Low cost fiber-to-the-node access network design

Considering the introduction of new internet protocol (IP) services, such as the high definition television (HDTV) over IP (IPTV) service, new network architectures and technologies should be introduced for the access network to improve the access rate. Actually, the best solution is to use the fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) architecture. However, this solution is still costly and cannot be widely deployed today. An interesting tradeoff is the fiber-to-the-node (FTTN) architecture, which reduces the copper portion of the access network. In this paper, we propose to tackle the FTTN network planning problem with the objective of minimizing the cost of the access network. An integer mathematical programming model is proposed for this problem. Next, a heuristic algorithm based on the tabu search principle is proposed to find “good” feasible solutions within a reasonable amount of computational time. Finally, numerical results are presented and analyzed.