Managing Traffic Growth in Next-Generation Telecom Networks

This dissertation investigates how to optimally manage the traffic and its growth as well as the resources in a telecom network using optical wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) technology.;A part of this dissertation addresses the Traffic Engineering (TE) problem, which determines how to set up explicit routes between source-destination pairs for various traffic demands so that the utilization of network resources is optimized. Our proposed algorithm also supports degraded-service, which is the amount of traffic that is guaranteed to be supported even in case of a failure.;However, we need to not only employ efficient traffic engineering methods to utilize the existing network resources optimally, but also we need to periodically upgrade the network to meet the increasing traffic demands. Such upgrades, which are referred to as Network Engineering (NE), determine the additional network resources that must be provided to meet the network performance while minimizing the incremental network cost. Our analysis shows how capacity exhaustion of critical cut sets indicates urgency of the need for upgrading a mesh network. Upgrading issues are also addressed from the viewpoints of two different business entities, namely an Internet service provider (ISP) and a network operator. We propose algorithms to optimize upgrade requirements of both of these entities. Our solutions achieve significant cost savings compared to conventional approaches.;We also investigate upgrade options for the access network which connects commercial and residential subscribers to the telecom central of fice (CO) and which is considered one of the most important parts of the Internet hierarchy. We perform a comparative study of the most prominent broadband technologies, namely EPON and WDM PON, and provide results which will motivate the practitioner towards development and adaptation of such technologies. We also report the performance of 10G EPON under practical deployment scenarios. Our results should help to guide and steer the deployment of this prominent broadband technology.