4.6. Automated Capacity Planning

Capacity planning is defined as the science and art of calculating the physical, hardware and transmission resources that will be required in order to serve the forecasted traffic over a certain period of time with the desired Quality of Service (QoS). It is a critical activity, since it determines the extent and scope of the operators’ investments, clearly stating where and when new resources need to be deployed. Under-dimensioned network resources will impact the delivered QoS negatively, whereas unnecessarily large or premature investments will jeopardize the operator’s financial performance.

In practice, these calculations are not only triggered to plan the network deployment in a new service area, but also to reinforce existing infrastructure in order to ensure the desired QoS across the network, anticipating the impact of the operator’s marketing initiatives (e.g. the launch of an especially appealing handset) or changes in service profiles (e.g. increasing data volumes due to lower tariffs).