Design and capacity planning of Next Generation Network (NGN)

The last decades has seen tremendous shifts in the telecommunications landscape. Telecom operators and service providers, are responding by adopting strategies that lower their costs of operations and allow them to offer rapidly new services with better revenues. The next generation network (NGN) is a network architecture that is ultimately designed for new service provision, independent of access technology. In addition to that, NGN can greatly reduce capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operational expenditure (OPEX), enables smooth transformation of the legacy networks into a simpler, but more powerful, while keeping compatibility to support traditional services. Worldwide, NGN deployment is still at an early stage, though some Telecom service providers including incumbent are in the process of finalizing their plans for deployment of NGN in their networks. This is likely to be implemented in a phased manner starting with core network and then the access network, and finally service provision. The first and unavoidable phase of NGN implementation is migrating the legacy Networks, starting with the Public Switching Telephone Network (PSTN) to NGN. In this paper, we present a cost effective, future proof solution architecture that can be used for the design and planning of the NGN network elements (NEs) capacity and dimensioning, to serve this migration phase.