Bandwidth Provisioning and Capacity Planning Tools

J. Almhanaa, Z. Liua, R. McGormanb, B. Lanteignea a University de Moncton, bLodex International Consulting {almhanaj, Lanteib, liuz}@umoncton.ca
We believe that provisioning tools will help ISPs to better manage their networks and optimize their resources. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, there have been no adequate tools available for bandwidth provisioning and network capacity planning for ISPs who offer so-called triple play services on the same medium: VoIP, TV and high speed internet access. Some existing VoIP tools [8] and video streaming calculators [10] offer partial or incomplete solutions to bandwidth provisioning, but these tools are not capable of handling general internet data traffic. Data traffic constitutes a major component of network traffic and must be taken into account. The objective of this paper is to describe new software tools we developed for bandwidth provisioning and network capacity planning for integrated VoIP and data services. These tools are part of the Data Traffic Analysis and Tools Development project [12]. Our tools contain several calculators for bandwidth provisioning for a medium containing VoIP and general data traffic. In this short paper, we focus only on the description of the tools without going into the implementation details, our main purpose is to introduce our tools and show its importance for ISP. The related theoretical background and implementation details are documented in [2, 3, 4, 5]. The rest of the paper is structured as follow: Section 2 briefly explores some theoretical background. Section 3 describes our tools in more detail. Section 4 compares our tools with various tools already available. Section 5 concludes the paper.

Abstract
Bandwidth provisioning is an important issue for Internet service providers (ISPs) and ensuring quality of service (QoS) is a major concern. QoS is closely related to the available bandwidth which itself is subject to financial constraints. Unfortunately, up to now there have been no adequate tools available in the market so that ISPs can do accurate bandwidth provisioning. In this paper, we describe the software tools developed by 1 GRETI for that purpose. These Tools provide several calculators for voice over IP and data traffic. Keywords: Network capacity planning, Internet traffic, Voice/IP, Traffic modeling, Network Tools

1. Introduction
For Internet service providers, bandwidth provisioning and ensuring QoS are important issues. Especially when facing vigorous competition, ISPs must provide satisfactory service levels, but cost pressures mean provisioning must be economical. An ISP can face several scenarios where more bandwidth is needed, including growth in subscribers and increased user demands for more Internet applications, such as VoIP (voice over internet protocol) and other data traffic. Because of the lack of appropriate planning tools, ISPs sometimes simply double network bandwidth and, therefore, their investment costs. This practice, amplified by overly optimistic bandwidth growth projections, led to a catastrophic economical impact in the last 5 years. Some cable companies now have more bandwidth than the market can consume. In other scenarios, ISPs want to increase profits from their existing communication networks by adding users or other services but they may be unsure about how to maintain QoS. QoS is related to user satisfaction, and can have an economic impact when dissatisfied users switch to another ISP for better service. Some other scenarios also exist, for example, an ISP may need to establish pricing based on various levels of quality of service.
1 Groupe de Recherche en Technologies Avances dInternet

2. Brief theoretical background of the tools

Traffic modeling is the first step towards bandwidth provisioning and network resource optimization. As a result, telecommunication traffic modeling has received considerable attention during the past decade. For the integrated service IP networks that we are considering, the traffic consists of voice, high speed Internet data, video streaming and background traffic. In practice, the total bandwidths are divided into several parts and are allocated to the various services. This static scheme is easy to implement but wastes a lot of bandwidth. In this paper, we focus on bandwidth provisioning and QoS for voice and data services.

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3. Description of our tools

2.1. Available Models for Bandwidth Provisioning
With an appropriate model, it is possible to perform calculations relating bandwidth, number of users, and QoS. For this reason, models are necessary for creating provisioning tools. Two well known models for voice traffic are: Poisson often used in the US, and Erlang B, often used in Canada. The main difference in their outputs is that Poisson provisions more channels than Erlang B, thus providing a margin of safety but also increasing the possibility of having unused channels. There is also an extension to the Erlang B model, simply known as Extended Erlang B. The Extended Erlang B takes into consideration the fact that a caller who is blocked due to lack of resources may retry immediately, increasing the traffic load. Models such as Poisson and Erlang B can be adapted for VoIP. This is accomplished by first finding the number of channels needed, and then translating this into a bandwidth requirement based on the codec being used and other factors. Another possibility is to use a Gaussian approximation to the Poisson model to find the number of channels. Voice traffic was well studied and understood. The challenge lies in modelling data traffic. A significant finding was that data traffic has long memory, namely, the autocorrelation function decays hyperbolically rather than exponentially [10]. This means that traditional teletraffic models based on Poisson processes are not suitable for high speed telecommunication network traffic modeling. On the other hand, since long range dependent processes have infinite memory, the model performance analysis becomes very complex. For this reason a lot of approximate models have been proposed, including the Markov modulated Poisson process models, e.g., [1] and the M/G/infinity model [7]. Our tools include seven calculators, for which Figure 1 shows the main interface. Due to space limits, we do not include the interface of each individual calculator.

Figure 1. The main interface The first two calculators are dedicated to VoIP. The first, called Voice Over IP Calculator, computes bandwidth, number of users and blocking probability (i.e. QoS) for homogenous voice traffic using a single type of CODEC. The second, called Multi-Codecs Voice Over IP Calculator does similar computations but for heterogeneous voice traffic generated from several user groups with different CODECs. For data traffic we have two options. The first is based on dimensioning formula [3], which is implemented in calculators 3 and 4. The second uses an empirical model based on the Gamma distribution, and is implemented in calculator 5. Using the dimensioning formula, calculator 3, called Dimensioning HSDT2 Calculator, computes one of the three quantities: number of users, bandwidth, and QoS. Given any two of these, it computes the third. Calculator 4, called Multi-Groups Dimensioning HSDT Calculator, is similar to the previous one but with it we can define several user groups with different requirements. Calculator 5, called Empirical HSDT Calculator, performs similar calculations to those of calculator 3 but using the Gamma model [5].

2.2. Models used in the tools

For the purpose of bandwidth provisioning, the traffic model should be very simple but flexible enough to capture various traffic patterns. Based on the central limit theory, when the number of subscribers is large enough, the aggregated voice traffic is approximated by a Gaussian distribution. For VoIP, our Bandwidth Capacity planning tools use the Gaussian model to perform the calculations relating bandwidth, number of users and blocking probability to determine the one unknown quantity. On the other hand, when it comes to data traffic modeling, our research has shown potential in the Gamma distribution, as seen in [5]. One of the data traffic calculators we implemented uses the Gamma distribution to perform its calculations. The other two data traffic calculators use the dimensioning formula described in [3].

2 HSDT: High Speed Data Traffic

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Calculators 6 and 7 are called Voice and Data Calculator and Multi-Groups Voice and Data Calculator, respectively. With them, bandwidth provisioning is done for traffic containing both data and voice. Dimensioning formula [3] is only used to model the
data traffic.

[3] J. Almhana, Z. Liu, V. Choulakian and R. McGorman, IP Network Traffic Modeling and Capacity Planning, Internal Report, 2005. [4] R. McGorman, J. Almhana, V. Choulakian, Z. Liu, W. Jedidi, Similarities between Voice and High Speed Internet Traffic Provisioning, Proceedings of CNSR2004. Fredericton, May 19-21, 2004. [5] R. McGorman et. al. Empirical Bandwidth Provisioning Models for High Speed Internet Traffic, Proceedings of CNSR2006, Moncton, May 24-25, 2006. [6] K. Park and W. Willinger, Self-similar network traffic and performance evaluation, John Wiley and Sons, Inc. New York, 2001 [7] M. M. Krunz and A.M. Makowski, Modeling video traffic using M/G/infinity input processes: A compromise between markovian and LRD models, IEEE J. Select. Areas Commun., 1998, pp. 733-748. [8] Voice/IP Calculators http://www.voipcalculator.com/calculator/ , 23/07/2004 [9] VoIP Providers List, VoIP Providers List VoIP Calculator, http://www.voipproviderslist.com/voipcalculator. [10] VSS, Video Streaming Hosting Calculator, http://www.videostreamingservices.com/Hosting_prices_ calculator.htm, 2003. [11] W. Leland, M. Taqqu, W. Willinger and D. Wilson, On the self-similar nature of Ethernet traffic, Proc. ACM SIGCOMM'93, pp. 183-193, 1993. [12] http://www.cnsr.info/research/componenth.php

4. Comparisons with other software

To the best of our knowledge, there are no similar tools available in the market with which we can compare our tools, especially for data traffic. However certain voice calculators like [8] perform similar computations to our first calculator. Our second calculator, related to voice traffic, goes beyond simple bandwidth calculations by adding multiple codec groups. This makes it more useful in practice.

5. Conclusion
In this paper, the motivation and brief descriptions of our Capacity Planning tools were given. We believe that such tools are needed by ISPs and would help them achieve better bandwidth provisioning in a market where vigorous competition is growing continuously. Our tools are currently at the prototype stage of development. Further tuning in cooperation with ISPs and more investigation are presently undergoing. In the future we are planning to add video streaming to our tools.

Acknowledgments
This work was jointly funded by ACOA and Nortel through the AIF to Dr. J. Almhana, and by NSERC to Dr. V. Choulakian.

References
[1] Allan T. Andersen and Bo Friis Nielsen, A Markovian Approach for Modeling Packet Traffic with Long-Range Dependance, IEEE Journal, June 1998, pp 719-732. [2] J. Almhana, Z. Liu, V. Choulakian and R. McGorman, A Recursive Algorithm for Gamma Mixture Models, Proc. of IEEE ICC 2006, Istanbul, 2006.

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