Optimization Issues in Telecommunications The complexity and size of modern telecommunications networks provide us with many challenges and opportunities. In this book, the challenges that we focus on are those which involve optimization. This simply refers to scenarios in which we are aiming to find something approaching the ‘best’ among many possible candidate solutions to a problem. For example, there are an intractably large number of ways to design the topology of a private data network for a large corporation....

Evolutionary Methods for the Design of Reliable Networks Alice E. Smith and Berna Dengiz Introduction to the Design Problem The problem of how to design a network so that certain constraints are met and one or more objectives are optimized is relevant in many real world applications in telecommunications (Abuali et al., 1994a; Jan et al., 1993; Koh and Lee, 1995; Walters and Smith, 1995), computer networking (Chopra et al., 1984; Pierre et al., 1995), water systems (Savic and Walters, 1995) and oil and gas lines (Goldberg, 1989). This chapter focuses on design of minimum cost reliable communications networks when a set...

In line with the rapid growth of telecommunications networks in recent years, there has been a corresponding increase in the level of network complexity. Consequently, it is now generally accepted that advanced computer aided simulation and analysis methods are essential aids to the management of large networks. The 1990s will be recalled as the decade of business process re-engineering

Telecommunications is a vital and growing area, important not only in its own right, but also for the service it provides to other areas of human endeavour. Moreover, there currently seems to be a demand for an ever-expanding set of telecommunication services of ever-increasing bandwidth. One particular technology that has the potential to provide the huge bandwidths necessary if such broadband services are to be widely adopted, is multiwavelength all-optical transport networks (Mukherjee, 1997)....

The telecommunications access network is the section of the network that connects the local exchange to the customers. At present most of the access network is composed of low bandwidth copper cable. Electronic communications are becoming an essential feature of life both at home and at work. The increasing use of applications that require larger bandwidths (such as the internet and video on demand) are making the copper infrastructure inadequate. These demands could be met using optical fibre technologies....

This chapter describes the joint application of two soft computing methods – evolutionary algorithms and fuzzy reasoning – to the problem of adaptive distributed routing control in packet-switched communication networks. In this problem, a collection of geographically distributed routing nodes are required to adaptively route data packets so as to minimise mean network packet delay. Nodes reach routing decisions locally using state measurements which are delayed and necessarily only available at discrete sampling intervals. ...

A routing algorithm constructs routing tables to forward communication packets based on network status information. Rapid inflation of the Internet increases demand for scalable and adaptive network routing algorithms. Conventional protocols such as the Routing Information Protocol (RIP) (Hedrick, 1988) and the Open Shortest-Path First protocol (OSPF) (Comer, 1995) are not adaptive algorithms; they because they only rely on hop count metrics to calculate shortest paths. In large networks, it is difficult to realize an adaptive algorithm based on conventional approaches. ...

All point-to-point communication networks have a means of directing traffic from a source to a destination via intermediate nodes. This routing function must be performed efficiently as it affects all aspects of network communications including jitter, latency and total bandwidth requirement. Other issues related to routing, such as policing and traffic control are not dealt with in this chapter. There are two distinct approaches to ‘routing’ traffic, namely connection-oriented and connectionless. ...

Computer networks are gaining increasing importance as they penetrate business and everyday life. Technological evolution results in increased computational power and transmission capacity. These phenomena open the way to the development and exploitation of new applications (e.g. video conferencing) which require demanding services from the network. As a result, computer networks are in continuous evolution and the protocols regulating their operation must be assessed for their suitability to new technologies and ability to support the new applications. ...

As Internet connectivity is reaching the global community, information systems are becoming more and more distributed. Inevitably, this overnight exponential growth has also caused traffic overload at various places in the network. Until recently, it was believed that scaling the Internet was simply an issue of adding more resources, i.e. bandwidth and processing power could be brought to where they were needed.

The software crisis is usually defined in terms of projects running over budget and over schedule, though an equally important aspect is the poor quality of software measured in terms of its correctness, reliability and performance. The consequences of releasing faulty software into service may be devastating in safety-related applications, telecommunications and other areas. When the USA telecommunications system failed and half of the nation was isolated, lives and property were clearly put at risk....

Channel Assignment Problems (CAPs) occur in the design of cellular mobile telecommunication systems (Jordan, 1996; Katzela and Naghshineh, 1996; MacDonald, 1979); such systems typically divide the geographical region to be serviced into a set of cells, each containing a base station. The available radio frequency spectrum is divided into a set of disjoint channels; these must be assigned to the base stations to meet the expected demand of each cell and to avoid electromagnetic interference during calls....