A Revenue-Based Model for Making Resource Investment Decisions in IP Networks

Abstract

Capacity planning is a critical task in network management. It identifies how much capacity is needed to match future traffic demand. It directly affects customer satisfaction and revenues. In this work we present a network usage analysis tool called Dynamic Netvalue Analyzer (DNA), which helps alleviate a big problem that network engineers and marketing executives face– making optimal resource investment decisions. DNA helps the prediction process by presenting actual network usage data from a business perspective, in a form that is useful to both network engineers and marketing executives. We show that information from DNA can be used to: (1) quantify revenue earned on each link, (2) quantify return-on-investment on performing a link upgrade, and (3) quantify the loss due to customer dissatisfaction when a link is not upgraded. We also illustrate how these formulations based on business information can be used to improve capacity planning decisions.