Cost minimization planning for greenfield passive optical networks

We plan greenfield PON networks to minimize their total deployment costs. We propose an efficient heuristic called the Recursive Association and Relocation Algorithm (RARA) to solve the optimization problem. Our algorithm can significantly reduce PON network deployment costs compared to an intuitive random-cut sectoring approach. To further tune down the costs, we also exploit the opportunity of cable conduit sharing by proposing an extension to RARA. Our case studies show that there are saturating trends for the PON deployment costs with the increase of the three system parameters, including maximal optical split ratio, maximal transmission distance, and maximal differential distance. Also, to reduce computation time for large PON deployment scenarios, we propose a disintegration planning method to divide a large planning scenario into several small ones. The method is found to be effective to provide close performance, but require much less computation, compared to the situation without disintegration.