Integration of equipment constraints in the capacity-planning process

This paper addresses the network capacity planning (or dimensioning) problem. The assignment of links capacity is often made by taking into account link costs and neglecting other equipment costs such as routers and line cards. However, with the massive deployment of optical fiber in all western countries, the cost of leasing transmission lines becomes cheaper and cheaper, and equipment costs are now a significant fraction of the total cost. The main contribution of this paper is to integrate the cost of the equipments in the capacity planning process. An exact algorithm and a local search-based heuristic are proposed to solve this problem. Numerical results show that significant cost-savings can be achieved when equipment costs are taken into account in the capacity planning process.