Providing Fault Tolerance in Wireless Backhaul Network Design with Path Restoration

This paper presents a survivable network design using network path restoration approach to provide fault tolerance in cellular backhaul network design, so that any breakdown of links within a network path can no longer interrupt the network services. As a consequence, the network design can greatly enhance the network reliability and quality of services. We adopt a two-phase network design approach to reduce the complexity of network design and to provide a design mechanism for enhancing reliability in existing networks. The first phase provides a minimum-cost initial network design. The problem is to find a minimum-cost network topology which includes selecting the location and type of base station controllers and mobile switching controllers as well as their link types. The second phase provides backup paths and spare capacity to the network topology from phase one to improve network reliability. Due to the complexity of network design problem, a genetic algorithm is applied as a meta-heuristic technique for obtaining good solutions. Various problem sizes of example networks are considered and discussed.