Designing partially survivable cellular telecommunications networks

In a cellular telecommunications network, a mobile telephone switching office (MTSO) co-ordinates the activities of the mobile units either directly or via intermediate base transceivers or hubs. In order to increase reliability, cells often split their traffic via multiple hubs – this ensures partial survivability in the face of equipment failures. One version of this problem was presented in Dutta and Kubat where it was solved heuristically. In this paper, we show how this problem can be reduced to a significantly smaller one – one which can be solved to optimality almost instantaneously even for instances much larger than those presented in Dutta and Kubat. Results from extensive computational tests are presented on various channel capacities, ranging from DS-1 to OC-192. The optimal approach is observed to provide better solutions in less time than the heuristic approach, thereby rendering the use of heuristic approaches unnecessary.