Experiences in designing a capacity planning tool for intelligent networks

The intelligent network (IN) concept brings with it a series of new telecommunications challenges from service design and management through to performance and network planning. This paper outlines some of the challenges facing network engineers in the widescale deployment of INs and reports on prototype IN capacity planning tool development being undertaken at the Software Engineering Research Centre. We commence this paper with a description of the challenges that the IN concept brings in capacity planning and how these differ from the historical approach to network planning. These challenges provide the motivation behind our prototyping activity, locally known as the Planet7 project. We give a brief introduction to this work and a short demonstration of the prototype itself. We conclude with a summary of the work and some planned future directions