Fuzzy particle swarm optimization algorithms for the open shortest path first weight setting problem

The open shortest path first (OSPF) routing protocol is a well-known approach for routing packets from a source node to a destination node. The protocol assigns weights (or costs) to the links of a network. These weights are used to determine the shortest paths between all sources to all destination nodes. Assignment of these weights to the links is classified as an NP-hard problem. The aim behind the solution to the OSPF weight setting problem is to obtain optimized routing paths to enhance the utilization of the network. This paper formulates the above problem as a multi-objective optimization problem. The optimization metrics are maximum utilization, number of congested links, and number of unused links. These metrics are conflicting in nature, which motivates the use of fuzzy logic to be employed as a tool to aggregate these metrics into a scalar cost function. This scalar cost function is then optimized using a fuzzy particle swarm optimization (FPSO) algorithm developed in this paper. A modified variant of the proposed PSO, namely, fuzzy evolutionary PSO (FEPSO), is also developed. FEPSO incorporates the characteristics of the simulated evolution heuristic into FPSO. Experimentation is done using 12 test cases reported in literature. These test cases consist of 50 and 100 nodes, with the number of arcs ranging from 148 to 503. Empirical results have been obtained and analyzed for different values of FPSO parameters. Results also suggest that FEPSO outperformed FPSO in terms of quality of solution by achieving improvements between 7 and 31 %. Furthermore, comparison of FEPSO with various other algorithms such as Pareto-dominance PSO, weighted aggregation PSO, NSGA-II, simulated evolution, and simulated annealing algorithms revealed that FEPSO performed better than all of them by achieving best results for two or all three objectives.