Automatic Design of Telecom Networks with Genetic Algorithms

Abstract

With the increasing demand for high-quality internet services, deploying GPON/Fiber-to-the-Home networks is one of the biggest challenges that internet providers have to deal with due to the significant investments involved. Automated network design usage becomes more critical to aid with planning the network by minimising the costs of planning and deployment. The main objective is to tackle this problem of optimisation of networks that requires taking into account multiple factors such as the equipment placement and their configuration, the optimisation of the cable routes, the optimisation of the clients’ allocation and other constraints involved in the minimisation problem. An AI-based solution is proposed to automate network design, which is a task typically done manually by teams of engineers. It is a difficult task requiring significant time to complete manually. To alleviate this tiresome task, we proposed a Genetic Algorithm using a two-level representation to design the networks automatically. To validate the approach, we compare the quality of the generated solutions with the handmade design ones that are deployed in the real world. The results show that our method can save costs and time in finding suitable and better solutions than existing ones, indicating its potential as a support design tool of solutions for GPON/Fiber-to-the-Home networks. In concrete, in the two scenarios where we validate our proposal, our approach can cut costs by 31% and by 52.2%, respectively, when compared with existing handmade ones, showcasing and validating the potential of the proposed approach.