A research on submarine cable path planning

Submarine optical fiber cables are essential carriers of international data transmission, and their laying and maintenance require significant investments. However, the failure of the submarine cable may cause severe socioeconomic damages, costs and disruptions. Therefore, it is important to build a cost-effective and resilient submarine cable network that can withstand potential natural or human-made disasters. This paper first discusses the current research progress on submarine cable path planning and cable network design. Next, it focuses on our approach based on a triangulated manifold is used to model the earth’s surface based on real-world geographic data. Then, for submarine cable path planning between two given end-points, the fast marching method (FMM) is used to solve a multi-objective path planning problem that takes into account a variety of design considerations aiming to optimize the survivability and cost of submarine cables. This multi-objective problem is then transformed into a single-objective problem by weighted sum method for solution. Finally, to overcome the difficulties associated with the massive data size that are prevalent in practical scalability and high-precision cable path planning design, two methods named multi-resolution and parallel FMM are proposed. Experimental results show the cable paths obtained by the multi-resolution and parallel FMM have lower cost, shorter length, and higher resolution than the results obtained from the sequential FMM method, which help to achieve scalability and high-quality cable path planning in the future.