A GA based approach for solving ring design telecommunication network

Improvement in physical network infrastructure is often required to enhance the services provided by telecommunication companies to meet consumer demand. One aspect of enhancement is to improve broadband access which is based on the Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) technology for Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH) networks. However, designing and deploying FTTH networks are costly due to the infrastructure costs such as digging up the road, laying the cables, installing the junction boxes, etc. This paper, based on a GA approach, focuses on optimizing the cost of designing ring topology for the GPON FTTH network. Our approach consists of three steps to achieve a near-optimum solution. The first step exploits the similarity between the traveling salesman problem (TSP) and the ring design problem. A GA is used to find a TSP solution for our problem. If the solution is not valid, then a second step based on another GA is executed to find a set of valid ring designs. The third step is used to group the obtained valid solutions and apply a customized GA with a specific crossover for further improvement. The proposed method will be tested with different networks to illustrate the effectiveness of our approach for solving the ring design problems.