Dimensioning optical networks: A practical approach

We present a method to generate optical transport network topologies that preserve the major characteristics of real-world transport network topologies. We also present an heuristic based on a genetic algorithm that, combined with the topology generator, can be used to obtain the lowest cost topology in a multi-layer optical transport network. In order to deal with survivable networks, we derive expressions to estimate the protection and restoration coefficients, without complete information. Finally, the impact of the traffic randomness in the obtained estimations is analyzed.