Designing fault tolerant wireless access networks

Providing fault tolerance in wireless access networks has become crucial as user dependence on mobile services increases, especially for business and emergency services. Unlike wired access networks, fault tolerant wireless network design can be costly, and highly complicated due to unique characteristics of wireless mobile networks, such as user mobility, that can significantly worsen network performance after failures. We present a novel network design model that incorporates the effect of user mobility for fault-tolerant wireless access networks. The problem was formulated as an integer programming (IP) model to minimize the total network interconnect cost while user demands and survivability requirements are satisfied.