ESTIMATION OF OPTICAL ACCESS NETWORK BANDWIDTH DEMAND USING MONTE CARLO SIMULATION

Abstract

Continuous forecast of bandwidth demand in order to achieve a proper network planning and dimensioning is one of the key challenges that network operators need to deal with. The importance of this issue is highlighted with the necessity of proper decision making regarding capital investments and the permanent increase in traffic volume. Under-investing in network resources lead to low network performances and hence dissatisfied customers, while over-investing may cause over-dimensioned capacities which leads to lower resource utilization and opportunity losses. In that perspective, it is essential to determine whether current network capacities satisfy bandwidth requirements. If it does, determining relevant time period is of great significance. As the bandwidth demand increases by the development of new services, the existing broadband networks need to be upgraded. The growing bottleneck can be solved rolling out optical access network. These networks are characterized by greater bandwidth supply enhancement compared to bandwidth demand. That fact emphasizes the need of appropriate bandwidth forecast. This paper presents model for optical access networks future bandwidth demand and network resource utilisation estimation. In order to appropriately address valid demand of all households in a given area, Monte Carlo simulation is applied.