Towards optimizing the deployment of optical access networks

Abstract

In this paper we study the cost-optimal deployment of optical access networks considering variants of the problem such as fiber to the home (FTTH), fiber to the building (FTTB), fiber to the curb (FTTC), or fiber to the neighborhood (FTTN). We identify the combinatorial structures of the most important sub-problems arising in this area and model these, e.g., as capacitated facility location, concentrator location, or Steiner tree problems. We discuss modeling alternatives as well. We finally construct a unified integer programming model that combines all sub-models and provides a global view of all these FTTx problems. We also summarize computational studies of various special cases.

Profitable areas in large-scale FTTH network optimization

“…Unfortunately, such models can be utilized for only comparatively small use cases, such as a 28-node network considered in [21]. A very good summary of the Integer Programming approach to the FTTH network design can be found in [13].…”

An (MI)LP-Based Primal Heuristic for 3-Architecture Connected Facility Location in Urban Access Network Design

“…These several deployments, usually called architectures, are denoted as a whole by the acronym FTTX (Fiber-To-The-X), where the X is specified on the basis of where the optical fiber granting access is terminated: major examples of architectures are Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH), bringing a fiber directly to the final user, and Fiber-To-The-Cabinet (FFTC) and Fiber-To-The-Building (FTTB), respectively bringing a fiber to a street cabinet or to the building of the user and then typically connecting the fiber termination point to the user through a copper-based connection. We refer the reader to [2] for an exhaustive introduction to FTTX network design and to [3] for a thorough discussion about the features of FTTH network design. Nowadays, an access network implementing a full FTTH architecture seems impractical, because of its extremely high deployment costs and since not all users are willing to pay higher fees for faster connections.…”

“…As a consequence, in recent times higher attention has been given to deployments mixing two architectures like FTTH and FTTC/FTTB (e.g., [4]). An even more recent and promising trend has been represented by the integration of wired and wireless connections, providing service to users also through wireless links and leading to 3-architecture networks that includes also the socalled Fiber-To-The-Air (FTTA) architecture [5,2]. This integration aims to get the best of both worlds: the high capacity offered by optical fiber networks and the mobility and ubiquity offered by wireless networks [5].…”

“…A distinctive feature of our model w.r.t. state-of-the-art literature available on the topic (see [4] and [2] for an overview) is to include the mathematical expressions that model wireless signal coverage and that evaluates the relation between useful and interfering signals. The inclusion of such expressions is critical in any wireless network design problem considering wireless signal coverage, since the exclusion may lead to wrong design decisions (see [6,7] for a discussion).…”

Comments on: Static and dynamic source locations in undirected networks

“…This means that, given an area to be evacuated, whose centroids are known, the evacuation of the people from each centroid towards the available shelters should occur using disjoint paths, where the disjunction has to be on the nodes (and so necessarily also on the links) and/or on the links (and so not necessarily on the nodes) of the network. Path disjunction problems (Andrews et al 2010) have received more attention in communication network applications (Grötschel et al 2014), but at the best of our knowledge, no contribution deals with them in evacuation planning.…”