TND is an interactive planning and development tool for fixed part of mobile communication networks, which meets these high demands. It enables engineers to optimize the network topology, routing and capacity for miscellaneous platforms and different points of view. In addition to a user friendly graphical interface substantial optimization methods in the field of basic research are included. The screenshots below show the network editor and network viewer as a part of TND tool. The network viewer is mainly used for animation during the optimization process. The optimization runs as a background process that communicates with the network viewer (inter-process communication).
TND comprises of the following components:
An important aspect of network planning tool is the representation of the results. TND provides a high-quality graphic user interface which indicates a good software design internally. This easy-to-use tool enables network planning engineer to run the planning activities effectively.
The optimization module offers a great variety of algorithms for technically relevant optimization problems as regards the design of communication networks. The solution methods enable the design engineer to quickly work out and eventually compare different solution proposals directly through the graphical user interface. The optimal topology design of communication networks is a combinatorial optimization problem where the exact solution is heavily achievable in justifiable time. Simulated Annealing (SA) and Threshold Accepting (TA) which have been used successfully for many combinatorial problems as non deterministic optimization algorithms are implemented within the TND project as built-in methods.
Telecommunication companies define complicated tariffs for rented lines. Many different cost structures are provided by TND at the disposal of the design engineer: constant, piecewise constant, steady and piecewise steady functions as well as freely definable analytical functions. The freely configurable cost calculation module makes it easy to control the cost of single network elements as well as the total network cost. This configuration facility allows the emulation of various cost structures, which can also be applied for test purposes.
The today's networks contain a quantity of several data and data structures:
The database module contains information for the construction of different networks e.g. technical data of the network components, tariffs or cost characteristics of the network components, geographical data, graphics for the representation of nodes, table of the Erlang-B and Poisson-Formulas etc.
TND has been developed under following environment: