Disaster-aware submarine fiber-optic cable deployment

Abstract

Network survivability is an important element in telecommunication network design nowadays because of the social and economic reliance on the Internet and the significant cost associated with service interruption. Moreover, the fact that submarine fiber-optic cables are susceptible to man-made or natural disasters, such as earthquakes, is well recognized. A disaster-resilient submarine cable deployment can save cost incurred by network operators such as the capacity loss cost, the cruising cost and the repair cost of the damaged cables, in order to restore network service when a cable break is prompted by a disaster occurrence. In this work, we investigate disaster-aware submarine cable deployment problem. While selecting a path for the cables, our approach aims to minimize the total expected loss cost, considering that submarine fiber-optic cables may break because of natural disasters, subject to deployment budget, path uniqueness, regular protection, elliptic shape, and linearization constraints. In our approach, we assume disaster-unrelated failures are handled by providing a backup cable along with primary cable. We consider a scenario with two nodes located on two different lands separated by a water body (sea/ocean). We then consider an elliptic cable shape to formulate the problem, which can be extended to other cable shapes, subject to avoiding deploying cable in disaster zones. We provide an Integer Linear Programming formulation for the problem. Finally, we present illustrative numerical examples that show the potential benefit of our approach as well as conclusion and future work.