Mathematical modeling and EDA-based network planning for broadband power line communication access systems

In this paper, we present a mathematical model of power line communication access systems and a technique for an efficient network deployment. We focus on the problem of designing an infrastructure network model which fits the power line communication needs and installing an apt number of base stations and repeaters at adequate locations suited to serve all the subscribers to the required level at a low cost to the utility company. The computational complexity of determining an optimal deployment by using exhaustive search grows exponentially with the number of base stations, repeaters and the users. We propose a heuristic method combined with an Estimation-of-Distribution Algorithm (EDA) for this assignment problem. EDA is a probabilistic evolutionary algorithm which updates its population at each iteration on the basis of the probability densities obtained from the population of superior candidates evaluated and chosen at the previous iteration.