Energy-efficient design and equipment placement for Wireless-Optical Broadband Access Networks

Together with the supported traffic, energy consumption in telecommunication networks is rapidly growing. Several models to reduce energy consumption in access networks have already been proposed. They mainly focus on energy management of network elements, like switching off underutilized network elements during low demand periods. However, the energy-efficiency of a network, especially an access network, depends significantly on the decisions taken during the design stages of the network pertaining to equipment placement. The main idea of this work is to provide a network planning approach for equipment placement in hybrid Wireless-Optical Broadband Access network (WOBAN) to optimize the cost and energy consumption of the network. This design should anticipate the behavior of network devices in a time varying context, considering the dynamic traffic variations during the day while satisfying coverage issues. We develop an optimization model to solve this problem and, by applying our model to some simple access network instances, we show that considering energy efficiency directly at the equipment placement phase helps in building energy efficient access networks.