Network-design sensitivity analysis

Abstract

Traffic matrices are used in many network engineering tasks, for instance optimal network design. Unfortunately, measurements of these matrices are error-prone, a problem that is exacerbated when they are extrapolated to provide the predictions used in planning. Practical network design and management should consider sensitivity to such errors, but although robust optimisation techniques exist, it seems they are rarely used, at least in part because of the difficulty in generating an ensemble of admissible traffic matrices with a controllable error level. We address this problem in our paper by presenting a fast and flexible technique of generating synthetic traffic matrices. We demonstrate the utility of the method by presenting a methodology for robust network design based on adaptation of the mean-risk analysis concept from finance.