Optimal Migration Planning of Telecommunication Equipment

Abstract

Frequent upgrades of equipment in the telecommunications industry occur due to the emergence of new services or technological breakthroughs. In this work, we consider a network where each client is linked to a site and handled by a card located on that site. A technological migration has to be undertaken within a short horizon of a few years and it consists of replacing all the existing cards by cards of a new generation within a fixed number of years. For practical considerations, all the cards of a site must be replaced in the same year. Furthermore, we can assume that, because of new offers, the number of clients per site is decreasing during the planning horizon. This enables us to reuse the new cards that are not used any more once some clients have left. The optimization problem consists of deciding, for each year, which sites are migrated and how many cards are bought or reused, in order to minimize the total cost. We present an exact solution for this problem, based on an integer linear programming formulation.