Intelligent Capacity Planning and Backbone Design

• Make recommendations on future network expansion based on forecasted requirements by studying the impact of adding new demands before they are placed on the real network.
• Determine whether there is sufficient available capacity, and if not, where more should be added.
• Determine which trunks can be pruned without compromising diversity constraints.

Design Types

• "Green Field" Design: Design a network from scratch.
• Incremental Design: Use forecasted traffic to design a network incrementally on top of an existing network configuration.
• Tariff-Based Design: Incorporate tariffs, or pricing data, for least-cost topology designs.
• Diversity/Resiliency Design: Ensure that the network design that can survive any level of user-defined resiliency requirements (e.g. any single node, card, link, SRLG, etc. failure). NPAT can determine what trunks should be optimally added to ensure all traffic is placed under any single element failure.

Path Assignments

For an existing backbone network, the optimal layout or path assignment can be determined which satisfies all demand constraints. Demand constraints may include media preferences, diverse paths, and hardware bandwidth overhead calculations. Available paths can be found even when the hardware fails to find a path. If the hardware switch supports user-specified paths, then paths found using the model can be downloaded to the real network.