Cyberplanner: A Network Resource Provisioning and Capacity Planning Framework

In a previous project, we have created a metrics tree model that includes a large set of metrics and establishes their correlations especially for those related to technology and network layers. A prototype system has been developed as well. Thanks to the metrics tree model, network planning, management and maintenance can now be customized to support specific business policies if it is provided with customer populations, sets of service offerings, and a given network infrastructure.

The objective of this project is two fold. First, we will continue our efforts on the metrics tree model and implement the prototype as a web service, accepting tree creation and computation requests, and allowing manipulation of the trees subsequently. This web based metrics tree will serve as a decision support system for numerous applications such as traffic engineering, capacity planning, etc. The second objective of this project focuses on the applications of the metrics tree model in addressing specific planning and traffic engineering problems. The latter will require the identification of new business, customer and service level metrics and their integration in the metrics tree model. Meanwhile, a monitoring and measurement infrastructure will be established to collect relevant data from various data sources for the metrics tree model. The expected result of this project is a software tool called Cyberplanner, which utilizes the metrics tree to provide advice to strategic planners and network engineers.