In-operation network planning

Abstract

Current transport networks are statically configured and managed, because they experience a rather limited traffic dynamicity. As a result, long planning cycles are used to upgrade the network and prepare it for the next planning period. Aimed at guaranteeing that the network can support the forecast traffic and deal with failure scenarios, spare capacity is usually installed, thus increasing network expenditures. Moreover, results from network capacity planning are manually deployed in the network, which limits the network agility. In this article, we propose a control and management architecture to allow the network to be dynamically operated. Employing those dynamicity capabilities, the network can be reconfigured and reoptimized in response to traffic changes in an automatic fashion; hence, the resource overprovisioning can be minimized and overall network costs reduced.