Roland Wessäly

DISCUS: an end-to-end solution for ubiquitous broadband optical access

Fiber to the premises has promised to increase the capacity in telecommunications access networks for well over 30 years. While it is widely recognized that optical-fiber-based access networks will be a necessity in the short to medium-term future, its large upfront cost and regulatory issues are pushing many operators to further postpone its deployment, while installing intermediate unambitious solutions such as fiber to the cabinet. Such high investment cost of both network access and core capacity upgrade often derives from poor planning strategies that do not consider the necessity to adequately modify the network architecture to fully exploit the cost benefit that a fiber-centric solution can bring. DISCUS is a European Framework 7 Integrated Project that, building on optical-centric solutions such as long-reach passive optical access and flat optical core, aims to deliver a cost-effective architecture for ubiquitous broadband services. DISCUS analyzes, designs, and demonstrates end-to-end architectures and technologies capable of saving cost and energy by reducing the number of electronic terminations in the network and sharing the deployment costs among a larger number of users compared to current fiber access systems. This article describes the network architecture and the supporting technologies behind DISCUS, giving an overview of the concepts and methodologies that will be used to deliver our end-to-end network solution.

On cut-based inequalities for capacitated network design polyhedra

In this article, we study capacitated network design problems. We unify and extend polyhedral results for directed, bidirected, and undirected link capacity models. Valid inequalities based on a network cut are known to be strong in several special cases. We show that regardless of the link model, facets of the polyhedra associated with such a cut translate to facets of the original network design polyhedra if the two subgraphs defined by the network cut are (strongly) connected. Our investigation of the facial structure of the cutset polyhedra allows to complement existing polyhedral results for the three variants by presenting facet-defining flow-cutset inequalities in a unifying way. In addition, we present a new class of facet-defining inequalities, showing as well that flow-cutset inequalities alone do not suffice to give a complete description for single-commodity, single-module cutset polyhedra in the bidirected and undirected case – in contrast to a known result for the directed case. The practical importance of the theoretical investigations is highlighted in an extensive computational study on 27 instances from the Survivable Network Design Library (SNDlib).

Modelling Feasible Network Configurations for UMTS

Telecommunications operators worldwide are facing the challenge of deploying UMTS. These networks have to meet consumers’ expectations, tight budget constraints and governmental regulations. The careful dimensioning of the radio access infrastructure plays an essential role in achieving these goals.

UMTS radio network evaluation and optimization beyond snapshots

A new evaluation scheme for universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) radio networks is introduced. The approach takes the complex coupling of coverage and capacity through interference into account. Cell load estimates, otherwise obtained through Monte-Carlo simulation, can now be approximated without time-consuming iterative simulations on user snapshots. The two cornerstones are the generalization of interference coupling matrices from user snapshots to average load and the emulation of load control by an analytical scaling scheme. Building on the new evaluation scheme, two novel radio network optimization algorithms are presented: an efficient local search procedure and a mixed integer program that aims at designing the coupling matrix. Computational experiments for optimizing antenna tilts show that our new approaches outperform traditional snapshot models

Planning fixed to flexgrid gradual migration: drivers and open issues

Flexgrid technology has recently been presented as the most promising option for upgrading the currently operating fixed grid optical networks and extending their capacity to be able to deal with the massive traffic volumes forecast for the next decade. Although the current traffic is successfully supported on fixed grid networks, flexgrid technology brings features that are not offered by the fixed grid networks, such as transporting optical connections with a capacity beyond 100 Gb/s and elasticity against time-varying traffic. In light of this, a gradual fixed grid to flexgrid migration is generally accepted in order to add these useful features to the network. In this article, we study the migration process where flexgrid is deployed in the network progressively, and review the main drivers and open issues induced by its deployment.

Cost-Efficient Network Synthesis from Leased Lines

Given a communication demand between each pair of nodes of a network, we consider the problem of deciding what capacity to install on each edge of the network in order to minimize the building cost of the network and to satisfy a given demand between each pair of nodes. The feasible capacities that can be leased from a network provider are of a particular kind in our case. There are a few so-called basic capacities having the property that every basic capacity is an integral multiple of every smaller basic capacity. An edge can be equipped with a capacity only if it is an integer combination of the basic capacities. In addition, we treat several restrictions on the routings of the demands (length restriction, diversification) and failures of single nodes or single edges. We formulate the problem as a mixed integer linear programming problem and develop a cutting plane algorithm as well as several heuristics to solve it. We report on computational results for real-world data.

Comparing restoration concepts using optimal network configurations with integrated hardware and routing decisions

We investigate the impact of link and path restoration on the cost of telecommunication networks. The main observation is that the cost of an optimal network configuration is almost independent of the restoration concept if (i) the installation of network elements (ADMs, DXCs, or routers) and interface cards, (ii) link capacities, and (iii) working and restoration routings are simultaneously optimized.We present a mixed-integer programming model which integrates all these decisions. Using a branch-and-cut algorithm (with column generation to deal with all admissible routing paths), we solve structurally different real-world based problem instances and show that the cost of optimal solutions is almost independent of the used restoration concept.In addition, we optimize spare capacities based on predetermined shortest working paths with respect to different link weights. On our test instances, the additional cost of solutions obtained with this sequential approach, compared to simultaneous optimization of working and restoration routings, varies between 0 and 164%.

A computational study for demand-wise shared protection

In this paper, we compare the new resilience mechanism demand-wise shared protection (DSP) with dedicated and shared path protection. The computational study on five realistic network planning scenarios reveals that that the best solutions for DSP are on average 15% percent better than the corresponding 1+1 dedicated path protection solutions, and only 15% percent worse than shared path protection.

DISCUS: End-to-end network design for ubiquitous high speed broadband services

Fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) has been long sought as the ultimate solution to satisfy the demand for broadband access in the foreseeable future, and offer distance-independent data rate within access network reach. However, currently deployed FTTP networks have in most cases only replaced the transmission medium, without improving the overall architecture, resulting in deployments that are only cost efficient in densely populated areas (effectively increasing the digital divide). In addition, the large potential increase in access capacity cannot be matched by a similar increase in core capacity at competitive cost, effectively moving the bottleneck from access to core. DISCUS is a European Integrated Project that, building on optical-centric solutions such as Long-Reach Passive Optical access and flat optical core, aims to deliver a cost-effective architecture for ubiquitous broadband services. One of the key features of the project is the end-to-end approach, which promises to deliver a complete network design and a conclusive analysis of its economic viability.

The Effect of Hop Limits on Optimal Cost in Survivable Network Design

We investigate the impact of hop-limited routing paths on the total cost of a telecommunication network. For different survivability settings (dedicated path protection, link and path restoration), the optimal network cost without restrictions on the admissible path set is compared to the results obtained with two strategies to impose hop limits on routing paths. Using optimal solutions for nine real-world based problem instances, we evaluate how much the restriction to short paths can increase network cost.