A Systematic, Automated Network Planning Method: A Case Study

This paper describes a case study conducted to evaluate the viability of a systematic, automated network planning method. The motivation for developing the network planning method was that many data networks are planned in an adhoc manner with no assurance of quality of the solution with respect to consistency and long-term characteristics. The developed method gives significant improvements on these parameters. The case study was conducted as a comparison between an existing network where the traffic was known and a proposed network designed by the developed method. It turned out that the proposed network performed better than the existing network with regard to the performance measurements used which reflected how well the traffic was routed in the networks and the cost of establishing the networks. Challenges that need to be solved before the developed method can be used to design network structures, that are ready to implement in a real world scenario, are discussed in the end of the paper. These are in the area of ensuring line independence and complexity of the design rules for the planning method.