Network Capacity Recovery and Efficient Capacity Deployment in Switching Centers

One way for service providers to reduce their costs is through network capacity recovery. We describe the problem of recovering capacity by minimizing the switching overhead incurred by multiple switches in a switching center. We also describe a tool called MASCOT (Mulitple ATM Switch Configuration Optimization Tool) which addresses this problem. Initially developed for ATM switches, the tool applies flexibly to other devices such as SONET cross-connects. New services enabled by this tool include 1) reconfiguration of an existing switching center to increase the number of available switch ports, and 2) efficient green field design for migrating to new hardware. Given the set of external trunks and the traffic demands between them, MASCOT searches for a switching center topology which minimizes the traffic carried on internal trunks. MASCOT handles a wide variety of switch types, with hierarchical constraints imposed by components such as interface cards, processor cards, and slots.