Allocating nodes to hubs for minimizing the hubs processing resources: A case study

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of allocating the terminal nodes to the hub nodes in a telecommunication network. Since the flow processing induces some undesirable delay, the objective is to minimize the total flow processed by the hubs. This study focuses on a real life network of the tunisian operator Tunisie Telecom whose operations managers are concerned by the quality of service. We provide three compact formulations that give optimal solutions for networks of large size. In particular, the last two are obtained by applying the Reformulation-Linearization Technique to a nonlinear formulation of the problem. The latter formulation derived within this approach is the most computationally effective, as pointed out by the computational experiments conducted on the real life network of Tunisie Telecom with 110 nodes and 5 hubs. Finally, we discuss and compare between the single allocation and double allocation configurations.