Cost-effective Network Planning for Rural Communities

Broadband Internet access is central to the regeneration of remote communities and reducing the digital divide between rural and urban regions. This paper focuses on rural communities with limited financial resources, environmental issues including long reach from conurbations, and mountainous or otherwise adverse terrain, typically with limited access to a wired power supply. As such, regular access technologies based on cable or fibre optics are not financially viable. To overcome this challenge, we consider the deployment of a Free-Space Optical (FSO) based relay network as primary technology, using diversity to provide resilience to atmospheric effects. More precisely, this paper describes a novel network planning tool based on a Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm (MOEA), that determines the suitable location of FSO relay nodes, taking into account end-to-end link speed and the degree of path diversity. This MOEA approach can account for Line-of-Sight occlusions and allows various compromises to be selected from a Pareto front to suit individual needs. We provide suitable results to show the satisfactory operation of the tool and outline avenues for future development.