Abstract
Submarine cables are indispensable in today’s international data transmission. In the process of submarine cable path planning, any factors that may potentially affect reliability and cost should be considered. Still, the degree of importance of these factors is difficult to assess accurately. Currently, cable path planning is done manually, meter by meter, over thousands of kilometers by experts that rely on their experience and expertise. This paper provides a submarine cable path planning algorithm based on simulated annealing (SA) and the fast marching method (FMM). It is called FMM/SA and can be used as a guide and benchmark for cable path planners and also enhances understanding of the multiple considerations and their corresponding weights aiming to further improve the end-results beyond what is obtained currently by experts. In FMM/SA, SA is used to optimize weights of design considerations to minimize the Fréchet distance between existing cable paths and paths with minimized total life-cycle cost obtained by FMM. FMM/SA is demonstrated to be superior to two other algorithms based on random-restart hill-climbing and Monte Carlo using real-life cable paths.
Highlights
W ITH recent technology push and demand pull mainly linked to the introduction of 5G technology and the COVID-19 outburst, we have seen continuous growth in global data and network traffic
Real-life existing cost-effective and resilient submarine cable path to obtain the weights of various design considerations in practice together with fast marching method (FMM) that performs the path planning optimization that relies on the weights obtained using simulated annealing (SA)
Based on the two real-life existing cable paths, the weights derived from the first real-life existing cable path are demonstrated on the second real-life existing cable path to show that our FMM/SA algorithm can provide a cable path that takes various design considerations into account with realistic priorities and is close to the second cable path that we consider
Summary
W ITH recent technology push and demand pull mainly linked to the introduction of 5G technology and the COVID-19 outburst, we have seen continuous growth in global data and network traffic. We first use a real-life existing submarine cable that has a history of resilience and as they were designed by experts, they are cost effective. Using this cable path, we derive design considerations’ weights. 1) We use the ArcGIS software [15] to combine detailed information on existing submarine cable paths’ data with information on the important design considerations described in [8] that include among others the basic construction cost, geological hazards, water depth, seabed slope, anthropological hazards, to consider their impact on the new submarine cable path planning.
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