Helping the Lone Operator in the Vast Frontier

Abstract

While the networking literature is replete with work on managing and operating networks---from the specifics of protocols to the design of management tools and architectures---there is comparatively little work on planning a network to be rolled out. In part this is because the task of network planning typically falls to carriers (for backbones) and cloud providers (for datacenters), which have the resources and the control to meet their specific needs. Here we consider network planning in situations that are quite different: resource poor and highly constrained.