English

A Robust Optimization Approach for Regenerator Placement in Fault-Tolerant Networks Under Discrete Cost Uncertainty

Networking and Internet Architecture 2026-02-12 v1

Abstract

We focus on robust, survivable communication networks, where network links and nodes are affected by an uncertainty set. In this sense, any network links might fail. Besides, a signal can only travel a maximum distance before its quality falls below a certain threshold, necessitating its regeneration by regenerators installed at network nodes. In addition, the price of installing and maintaining regenerators belongs to a discrete uncertainty set. Robust optimization seeks a solution with guaranteed performance against all scenarios modeled in an uncertainty set. Thus, the problem is to find a subset of nodes with minimum cost for the placement of the regenerator, ensuring that all nodes can communicate even if a subset of network links fails. To solve the problem optimally, we propose two solution approaches, including one flow-based and one cut-based integer programming formulation, as well as their iterative exact method. Our theoretical and experimental results show the effectiveness of our methods.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.11058,
  title  = {A Robust Optimization Approach for Regenerator Placement in Fault-Tolerant Networks Under Discrete Cost Uncertainty},
  author = {Mohammad Khosravi and Setareh Maghsudi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.11058},
  year   = {2026}
}