Multi-Objective Topology Planning for Microwave-Based Wireless Backhaul Networks

Wireless backhaul networks provide vital infrastructure support for large public and private networks, and their efficient design is essential for smoothly handling the rapid growth of the Internet traffic. For its efficient capacity utilization, a well-planned topology would be crucial for such networks. Existing studies on planning for wireless backhaul network topologies have mostly focused on a single parameter or on a few performance aspects, e.g., to minimize the network cost or to maximize the network reliability. It would, however, be more realistic to consider multiple performance aspects jointly, subject to a variety of system constraints for a microwave-based wireless backhaul network, as proposed in this paper. For the optimization, we formulate a general cost that incorporates the various performance aspects considered, based on different weight factors. We develop an integer linear programming (ILP) optimization model and also propose an efficient heuristic algorithm to plan cost-minimized tree topologies for both single stage and multi-stage design scenarios. This paper shows that the proposed heuristic algorithm is efficient to optimize multiple system objectives jointly and performs close to the ILP model. The performances of the topologies planned with the periodic constraint and the single stage scenario are also close to each other further confirming the efficiency of the proposed heuristic algorithm.