SONET stands for synchronous optical network, which is the transmission standard for PSTN (public switched telephone network) backbone. Hong Kong Telecom's PSTN transmission backbone utilizes the SONET technology. Its backbone network consists of 7 SONET rings interconnected together, There are a number of ADMs (add-drop multiplexers) placed upon each ring. The job of an ADM is to multiplex and demultiplex the backbone traffic. ADMs are very expensive SONET equipment which make up a large portion of the cost of the backbone network. The objective of this project is to minimize the number of ADMs on each SONET ring subject to a number of traffic and physical constraints. We attempted in this project to use integer programmin, techniques and heuristic methods to solve the problem. By solv...[ Read more ]

SONET stands for synchronous optical network, which is the transmission standard for PSTN (public switched telephone network) backbone. Hong Kong Telecom's PSTN transmission backbone utilizes the SONET technology. Its backbone network consists of 7 SONET rings interconnected together, There are a number of ADMs (add-drop multiplexers) placed upon each ring. The job of an ADM is to multiplex and demultiplex the backbone traffic. ADMs are very expensive SONET equipment which make up a large portion of the cost of the backbone network. The objective of this project is to minimize the number of ADMs on each SONET ring subject to a number of traffic and physical constraints. We attempted in this project to use integer programmin, techniques and heuristic methods to solve the problem. By solving the problem, we actually tried to find a sub-optimal solution to the problem. In other words, given a traffic demand matrix we tried to find an minimum cost backbone network to support the traffic. The costs of the original backbone network and the optimized backbone network were then compared to show the improvement in the new network.