Roll-out of reliable fiber to the cabinet: An interactive planning approach

In this paper a total approach is presented for interactive planning of a reliable fiber-to-the-cabinet network. Interactive means here that areas with 600 to 1000 cabinets can be planned roughly within minutes. The problem of telecom operators, when planning fiber to the cabinet, is to find the minimum number of cabinets that are equipped with active equipment such that a required number of customers are within a targeted distance from an activated cabinet. Next, these activated cabinets need to be clustered and connected with a highly reliable fiber ring, satisfying capacity constraints. A three-step approach is described: an activation problem, a cluster problem, and a routing problem, each in a heuristic approach. The paper shows that the total interactive approach is indeed possible by presenting several real life cases.