Efficient Load Balancing for a Resilient Packet Ring Using Artificial Bee Colony

Resilient Packet Ring (RPR), also known as IEEE 802.17, is a standard designed for optimising the transport of data traffic over optical fiber ring networks. The Weighted Ring Arc-Loading Problem (WRALP) is a NP-complete problem that arises in engineering and planning of the RPR systems. Specifically, for a given set of non-split and uni-directional point-to-point demands (weights), the objective is to find the routing for each demand (i.e., assignment of the demand to either clockwise or counter-clockwise ring) so that the maximum arc load will be minimised. This paper suggests an efficient traffic loading algorithm- Artificial Bee Colony (ABC). We compare our results with the ones obtained by the standard Genetic Algorithm, Tabu Search Algorithm and Particle Swarm Optimisation, used in literature. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the ABC algorithm.