AN OVERVIEW OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS TRANSPORT NETWORK PLANNING

摘要

The transport planning problem deals with providing enough transmission capacity in the network in meeting some service demand level, while minimizing capital spending and cost. The transport planning problem is a non-trivial problem to solve due to several issues such as, constant changing traffic patterns, constant changing traffic loads, very long lead times in planning and provisioning transport facilities and transport equipment, planning taking into account capacity reserves in handling potential shortfalls, traffic needing to be routed in diverse paths in minimizing node-and-link failure impacts and changing technologies and topologies. Most introductory telecommunications courses cover networking mostly at the LAN level and touches on the WAN level. This makes sense in that most employment opportunities are at the LAN level. In most cases, knowledge gain about transport planning of very large scaled telecommunications networks comes from on-the-job-training working in a network planning role with a company managing a very large backbone network (ie. AT&T, MCI, British Telecom, etc..). There have not been an abundance of knowledge-disbursing materials regarding transport planning of very large scaled and global telecommunications networks. This paper describes and explains the approaches and goals of planning transport facilities and transport equipment for very large scaled telecommunications backbone networks. This paper will overview the goals, processes, methods, tasks and decisions made in performing transport facility and equipment planning.