Abstract:Telecommunications networks are fundamental in any telecommunications system. The network has to meet a number of criteria for the performance to be satisfactory. Hence, when designing the network, one may pose a number of optimization problems whose solutions give networks that are, in some sense, optimally designed. As the networks have become increasingly complex, the aid of optimization techniques has also become increasingly important. This is a vast area, and this chapter considers an overview of the issues that arise as well as a number of specific optimization models and problems. Often the problems may be formulated as mixed-integer linear programs. Due to problem size and problem structure, in many cases specially tailored solution techniques need to be used in order to solve, or approximately solve, the problems.