Wide Area Telecommunication Network Design : Application to the Alberta Supernet

As Internet technologies for long-distance transmission fall in price, and the volume of data transmission surpasses that of voice transmission, networks developed solely for the Internet are becoming the trend. However, long-distance Internet technologies add considerable delay to the signal and reduce its effectiveness for real-time communication, in particular, video-conferencing and broadband entertainment in wide area network design. Consequently, a mixture of technologies is necessary in designing a wide area Internet network that allows real-time communication. For various reasons, existing operations research models used in telecommunication are inadequate for our network design problem, so we propose new models and solution algorithms that allow for specific characteristics of network design. Our models extend those in literature by accounting for constraints on the distance between signal regenerators, and for the costs of sheltering this equipment. We used the Alberta SuperNet project as benchmark for wide area Internet network design for our models. The Alberta SuperNet is a cooperation between the Alberta Provincial Government and the private sector, lead by Bell West Inc. Bell West designed a high-speed Internet network that connects 422 communities in Alberta through Gigabit Ethernet optical fibre connections. The province is the first in Canada to provide this service to smaller communities