Latency-Aware Optimization of Submarine Communication Cable Systems With Trunk-and-Branch Topologies

Abstract

We provide an optimized design solution, called Lagrangian Fast Marching (LAFM), for the most popular submarine cable system topology (trunk-and-branch), on the undersea surface of the earth modeled by a triangulated 2D manifold in a 3D Euclidean space. Design optimization is formulated as a Steiner minimal tree problem, where each Steiner node models a branching unit (BU). Our objective is to minimize the total cost of the cable system, including both actual cable laying and BU costs as well as a measure of risk associated with location and topography. We minimize this total cost while imposing latency constraints limiting the length of cable between specified pairs of nodes. As most BUs in..