As a key enabler of broadband Britain , near-future multimedia communications will require high-capacity networks realised through optical wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology. Such systems have the potential to cater for enormous numbers of customers simultaneously, making fast and efficient restoration of service after failure an essential network attribute. Recent world events have also prompted many network and service providers to review their plans and strategies relating to resilience, restoration and disaster recovery on a countrywide and even international scale [1].
Design of resilient networks is a hugely complex process since inefficient designs can result in a combination of unnecessarily high investment, inability to meet customer demands and inadequate service performance. As network size increases, a manual process rapidly becomes unfeasible and automated tools to assist the network planner become essential. This chapter discusses state-of-the-art software tools and algorithms developed by BT Exact for automated topological network design, planning of restoration/resilience capacity, and calculation of end-to-end service availability.
The design challenges [2] associated with automatic network planning are mathematically hard and generally beyond formal optimisation techniques (e.g. linear programming) for realistically sized problems. The tool used by BT relies on iterative heuristics, accurately reflecting the complex structure and guaranteeing wide applicability to a large class of problems. Computational experience has shown that although this procedure is fast and simple, it nevertheless yields solutions of a quality competitive with other much slower procedures. Many extensions of the assumptions are possible without...
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