Single PON network design with unconstrained splitting stages

• We have reviewed the paper in order to meet the referees’ comments.
• All typographical errors/inconsistencies pointed out by Referee 1 were corrected.
• The observation of Reviewer 2 on how each splitter works was accepted.
• We enhanced the explanation associated with Fig. 4 to meet Referee 2 observations.

A Passive Optical Network (PON) is a network technology for deploying access networks based on passive optical components. In a single PON access network, the client terminals are connected to a Central Office through optical splitters and interconnecting fibers where each splitter splits in equal parts the input optical signal coming from the Central Office over its different output fibers. In this paper, we consider PON topology solutions where the splitting ratio and the number of splitting stages are not constrained to a given target design but, instead, are decided based on the cost of the solutions. We present different Integer Linear Programming formulations to model this problem and provide computational results showing that the optimal solutions can be computed for realistic problem instances. In addition, we describe how the formulations can be adapted for the traditional PON topology approaches and present computational results showing that significant cost gains are obtained with the unconstrained splitting stage approach.