Patent ID: 8861395

Claim:
A process for dimensioning a cellular telecommunications network, including, for each of one or more network elements of said network: accessing network element environment data representing a configuration and environment of the network element; accessing QoS data representing quality of service (QoS) criteria for users of said network; and processing the network element environment data and said QoS data to generate network element capacity data representing combinations of loads of network services corresponding to capacities of said network element that meet said quality of service criteria, wherein the network element capacity data represents an admission region boundary between combinations of loads of said services that meet said quality of service criteria and combinations of loads of said services wherein at least one of said quality of service criteria is not met, and wherein the admission region boundary is multi-dimensional and each dimension corresponds to one network service, and wherein the processing includes: generating data representing simulated resources for a simulated network element corresponding to resources of the network element; accessing data representing amounts of simulated resources used by simulated services corresponding to the network services; and performing a simulation process sequentially for each of a plurality of simulated connections to determine the admission region boundary, wherein the simulation process includes: determining that one of the plurality of simulated connections requires at least one of the simulated services; reducing at least one of the simulated resources by an amount used by the at least one simulated service; and determining if the residual amount of the reduced at least one simulated resource is sufficient to meet the QoS criteria.