As customers consume more and more rich media on their phones network capacity requirements increase and capacity across the network becomes less uniform (pockets of high demand appear).
Accurate planning and forecasting cell and link capacity is required to ensure upgrades are implemented before customers notice congestion and poor quality of service. This, coupled with the fact modern sites often consist of at least 3 technologies (typically GSM, UMTS and LTE) served by a mixture of TDM and IP, wireless and wired connections means capacity planning is no longer a simple exercise.
DIMENSION is an end-to-end network capacity planning tool providing network visualization, capacity management and scenario planning (what-if analysis and forecasting). It enables operators to model and visualize their entire multi-vendor and multi-layer network topology in one place from RAN to Core and Transmission.
Multiple planners can work simultaneously, understanding network connectivity, identifying capacity bottlenecks, and planning the end-to-end network faster and more accurately. DIMENSION the capacity resources of base stations and controllers as well as their interfaces, to be seamlessly dimensioned based on historical traffic data. DIMENSION allows traffic to be routed both automatically and manually as multiple traffic streams per site on the physical layer and on the various logical layers. It also enables quick what-if analysis and powerful scenario planning capabilities to help you identify the best plan to meet forecast network growth.
PLAN FOR TRAFFIC GROWTH
Network upgrades, particularly for transmission, have historically been mostly reactive. With networks carrying larger volumes of data, capacity upgrades have become key to network performance and a much higher proportion of network costs. These two factors mean it is important to accurately dimension and route traffic as well as forecast upgrades and ensure they are implemented before the network congests and customer quality of service is affected.
Scenario planning is a key component of dimensioning exercises that allows engineers to investigate various traffic growth scenarios. DIMENSION is able to utilize historical performance management traffic data to accurately forecast future traffic and plan accordingly. Accurately forecasting equipment requirements also ensures CAPEX is optimized and helps with budgeting.
VISUALIZE MULTI-VENDOR, MULTI-DOMAIN TOPOLOGIES
Many operators still rely on network diagrams and spreadsheets for topology, capacity planning and traffic routing. This approach is slow, error prone and difficult to maintain. It is also very hard to get a detailed view of the entire multi-vendor network.
DIMENSION provides a software-based approach that replaces the slow and error-prone network diagram and spreadsheet method, increasing operational efficiency and reducing OPEX. The ability to visualize multi-vendor and multi-domain network topology and routing information in a single place enables engineers to understand the network and validate recommendations provided, or to plan their own.