Optimization in Telecommunication Networks

Network design and network synthesis have been the classical optimization problems intelecommunication for a long time. In the recent past, there have been many technologicaldevelopments such as digitization of information, optical networks, internet, and wirelessnetworks. These developments have led to a series of new optimization problems. Thismanuscript gives an overview of the developments in solving both classical and moderntelecom optimization problems.We start with a short historical overview of the technological developments. Then,the classical (still actual) network design and synthesis problems are described with anemphasis on the latest developments on modelling and solving them. Classical results suchas Menger’s disjoint paths theorem, and Ford-Fulkerson’s max-flow-min-cut theorem, butalso Gomory-Hu trees and the Okamura-Seymour cut-condition, will be related to themodels described. Finally, we describe recent optimization problems such as routing andwavelength assignment, and grooming in optical networks.operations research and management science;

Design and provisioning of WDM networks for traffic grooming

Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) is the most viable technique for utilizing the enormous amounts of bandwidth inherently available in optical fibers. However, the bandwidth offered by a single wavelength in WDM networks is on the order of tens of Gigabits per second, while most of the applications\u27 bandwidth requirements are still subwavelength. Therefore, cost-effective design and provisioning of WDM networks require that traffic from different sessions share bandwidth of a single wavelength by employing electronic multiplexing at higher layers. This is known as traffic grooming. Optical networks supporting traffic grooming are usually designed in a way such that the cost of the higher layer equipment used to support a given traffic matrix is reduced. In this thesis, we propose a number of optimal and heuristic solutions for the design and provisioning of optical networks for traffic grooming with an objective of network cost reduction. In doing so, we address several practical issues. Specifically, we address the design and provisioning of WDM networks on unidirectional and bidirectional rings for arbitrary unicast traffic grooming, and on mesh topologies for arbitrary multipoint traffic grooming. In multipoint traffic grooming, we address both multicast and many-to-one traffic grooming problems. We provide a unified frame work for optimal and approximate network dimensioning and channel provisioning for the generic multicast traffic grooming problem, as well as some variants of the problem. For many-to-one traffic grooming we propose optimal as well as heuristic solutions. Optimal formulations which are inherently non-linear are mapped to an optimal linear formulation. In the heuristic solutions, we employ different problem specific search strategies to explore the solution space. We provide a number of experimental results to show the efficacy of our proposed techniques for the traffic grooming problem in WDM networks

Traffic Grooming in Unidirectional WDM Rings with Bounded Degree Request Graph

Traffic grooming is a major issue in optical networks. It refers to grouping low rate signals into higher speed streams, in order to reduce the equipment cost. In SONET WDM networks, this cost is mostly given by the number of electronic terminations, namely ADMs. We consider the case when the topology is a unidirectional ring. In graph-theoretical terms, the traffic grooming problem in this case consists in partitioning the edges of a request graph into subgraphs with a maximum number of edges, while minimizing the total number of vertices of the decomposition. We consider the case when the request graph has bounded maximum degree $\Delta$, and our aim is to design a network being able to support any request graph satisfying the degree constraints. The existing theoretical models in the literature are much more rigid, and do not allow such adaptability. We formalize the problem, and solve the cases $\Delta=2$ (for all values of $C$) and $\Delta = 3$ (except the case C=4). We also provide lower and upper bounds for the general case

Economic Analysis of SONET/WDM UPSR and BLSR Ring Networks Using Traffic Grooming

We consider the traffic grooming problem for the design of SONET/WDM(Synchronous Optical NETwork/ Wavelength Division Multiplexing) ring networks. Given a physical network with ring topology and a set of traffic demands between pairs of nodes, we are to obtain a stack of rings with the objective of minimizing the number of ADMs installed at the nodes. This problem arises when a single ring capacity is not large enough to accommodate all the demands. As a solution method, an efficient algorithm based on the branch-and-price approach has been reported in the literature for the problem in which only unidirecional path switched ring (UPSR) was considered. In this study, we suggest integer programming models and the algorithms based on the same approach as the above one, considering two-fiber bidirectional line switched ring(BLSR/2), and BLSR/4 additionally. Using the results, we compare the number of required ADMs for all types of the ring architecture

Traffic Grooming in Bidirectional WDM Ring Networks

We study the minimization of ADMs (Add-Drop Multiplexers) in optical WDM bidirectional rings considering symmetric shortest path routing and all-to-all unitary requests. We precisely formulate the problem in terms of graph decompositions, and state a general lower bound for all the values of the grooming factor $C$ and $N$, the size of the ring. We first study exhaustively the cases $C=1$, $C = 2$, and $C=3$, providing improved lower bounds, optimal constructions for several infinite families, as well as asymptotically optimal constructions and approximations. We then study the case $C>3$, focusing specifically on the case $C = k(k+1)/2$ for some $k \geq 1$. We give optimal decompositions for several congruence classes of $N$ using the existence of some combinatorial designs. We conclude with a comparison of the cost functions in unidirectional and bidirectional WDM rings