An Approximate Solution Using K-Shortest Paths for a Communication Link Load Balancing Problem

In recent years, the amount of data traffic in information and communication networks has been increasing and the risk of congestion has been rising. Our previous study formulated a problem to determine the flow distribution that minimizes the maximum load factor of links with a goal of leveling the traffic load on the communication links. This problem is called UELB problem and proven to be NP-hard. Therefore, this paper proposes an approximate solution method for the UELB problem using K-shortest paths as one of the heuristic methods. As a result, the proposed method could obtain a feasible solution with less computational complexity than obtaining an exact solution.