Optimizing splitter and fiber location in a multilevel optical FTTH network

Due to the emergence of bandwidth-requiring services, telecommunication operators are brought to renew their fixed access network, most of them favoring the Fiber To The Home (FTTH) technology. This paper focuses on the optimization of FTTH deployment, which is of prime importance due to the economic stakes. The key design issue here is locating splitters and routing fibers in an existing network infrastructure to which is associated a graph with given capacities on the edges. No assumption is made on the structure of the graph. First we propose a mixed integer formulation for this decision problem and we prove it is NP-hard. Then, valid inequalities and problem size reduction schemes are presented. Finally, the efficiency of solution approaches is assessed through extensive numerical tests performed on France Télécom-Orange real-life data.