Selection and placement of switching equipment in a Broadband Access Network

Motivated by the tremendous demands for cheaper and faster broadband access solutions, we propose a novel and optimal network design optimization scheme for a Broadband Access Network (namely, WDM PON. For a given geographical location of ONUs and their received/sent traffic demand, our proposed optimization scheme minimizes the WDM PON network deployment cost by generating the cost effective location of switching equipment. The solution scheme proceeds in two phases. In the first phase, ONUs are grouped into different clusters exploiting a hierarchical clustering heuristic. In the second phase, we develop a a mathematical model based on column generation (CG) algorithm which generates the minimum cost multi-stage placement equipment topology by selecting the best type and location of the switching equipment. The resulting combination of the clustering and of the column generation algorithms outputs the grouping of ONUS along with the type (either splitter or AWG) and the location of the switching equipment of the PON network. Computational results demonstrate the validation and effectiveness of the proposed solution scheme on various data sets.