AT&T Labs Research — Leading Invention, Driving Innovation

Monitoring of customer bandwidth demand is accomplished by comparing mean access router uplink utilization to a prescribed threshold value that is computed based upon granular measurements of uplink utilization. This provides an indication of whether customer demand is met with a statistical level of confidence. Further, the actually measured access router uplink utilization can be used to make a predictive assessment of whether to provision a new customer on the access router without adversely affecting existing customers.

Unavailable customer bandwidth in a connectionless IP network (100) is determined by first measuring network accessibility and network continuity (in Defects Per Million) via an accessibility measurement instrumentation device (202) and a continuity measurement instrumentation device (204). The accessibility and continuity measurements are combined via a mechanism (206) to yield a service unavailability measure that is then compared to a threshold value, representing the applicable customer unavailable bandwidth specified under an service level agreement specification (210). If the actual service unavailability exceeds the allowable unavailable customer bandwidth under the service level agreement, then an event correlation device (212) will correlate the service unavailability measure with network fault and performance alarm information from network alarms (216) to establish a root cause. Once the route cause is established, a trouble ticket system (218) generates a trouble ticket to facilitate network restoration.

A method for dimensioning link bandwidth for elastic-data traffic for a link in a communications network, in which a number of connections N having elastic-data traffic flowing over a bottlenecked link in a communications network is determined. A transfer rate ?f for each connection is determined for the condition that the communications network is not a constraining resource for the connection. A per-connection bandwidth objective b is determined for elastic-data traffic flowing over the link. Lastly, a link bandwidth B for the link is dimensioned for the elastic-data traffic flowing over the link based on either a mean performance criterion or a tail performance criterion using the determined number of connections N, the determined transfer rate for each connection and the determined per-connection bandwidth objective b.