Location and Allocation of Switching Equipment (Splitters/AWGs) in a WDM PON Network

With the growing popularity of bandwidth demanding services such as HDTV, VoD, and video conferencing applications, there is an increasing demand on broadband access. To meet this demand, the access networks are evolving from the traditional DSL and cable techniques to a new generation of fiber-based access techniques. While EPONs and GPONs have been the most studied passive optical access networks (PONs), WDM-PON is more often seen as the next generation trend with an hybrid set of switching equipment. We propose a new optimization scheme for the deployment of greenfield WDM PON networks to minimize their total deployment costs. Based on the geographic location of ONUs and their corresponding traffic demand, our proposed scheme optimizes the placement of splitters and AWGs in a WDM PON. The solution process has two phases. In the first phase, ONUs are grouped around switching equipment into different clusters and then each cluster is assigned a passive equipment(i.e.,splitter/AWG). In the second phase, we develop a column generation (CG) algorithm based on a mathematical model, for selecting the best multi-stage placement equipment topology. The resulting combination of the clustering and of the column generation algorithms encompasses the particular cases where all switching equipment are splitters/AWGs/mixture and outputs the location of the switching equipment of the PON network. Numerical results allow the validation of the models and of the algorithms on various data sets.