A visual planning tool for hybrid fibre VDSL access networks with heuristic algorithms

Hybrid fibre-VDSL (Very high speed Digital Subscriber Line) access network is one of the most efficient strategies to transfer broadband services to end users. However, the planning of hybrid access networks is a NP-hard problem. During the planning and optimisation approach, the network costs, time delay and reliability have to be taken into account. This paper presents a novel planning tool for hybrid fibre-VDSL access networks with visualisation. Simulated Annealing, Tabu Search and Genetic Algorithms, as the effective heuristic algorithms, have been investigated and embedded into the planning tool to obtain optimal topologies.