Optical network net present value optimization in shared path protection environments

Abstract

Network operators are facing hard competition for opportunities in the telecommunications market, thus network investments must be carefully evaluated from the costs and revenues viewpoint before the decision making process. Since a great part of core network operators’ revenues comes from the provisioned connectivity services, in this work we study the value expected to generate by optical networks when provisioning differentiated services in Shared Path Protection (SPP) environments. In this regard, two wavelength partitioning schemes are compared: the shared (sh-WS) and the differentiated (diff-WS). The benefits of both schemes are evaluated from an economic perspective defining costs and revenues models and using Net Present Value (NPV). We define the Optical Network NPV Optimization (OVALO) problem as a NPV maximization problem. To solve OVALO, a linearized version of NPV is proposed as objective function of the Integer Linear Programming (ILP) model and an iterative algorithm is used to finally solve OVALO. The partitioning schemes are numerically compared on two network topologies. From the results, we show that diff-WS maximizes resource utilization in the network without significantly increasing network costs, thus maximizing the network’s value.