A Method and Simulation Study: Network Dimensioning of the Broadband Residential Ethernet-based Access Network

Network dimensioning is an indispensable component of QoS provisioning in the residential multi-service IPbased access networks. This paper discusses network dimensioning of the residential multi-service IP-based access networks over Ethernet thoroughly, i.e. a Broadband Residential Ethernet-Based Access Network (BREAN), and tries to find a pragmatic engineering method of network dimensioning. We propose that the layer 2 Ethernet domain of the BREAN implements EF (PHB and PDB) and AF (PHB and PDB) services of DiffServ so that we can deploy a same method of network dimensioning in the whole BREAN. This paper investigates the past study efforts of network dimensioning, and expends or amends some study results with DiffServ, such as the universal link model, the dimensioning for the elastic traffic and the stream traffic, traffic matrix and user model. By systematic method, combining these indispensable components gives a rather pragmatic engineering method of network dimensioning in the BREAN, offering PTOS, VoIP, TV, VoD and Internet access, etc. We validate our method of network dimensioning by the simulations, and the simulation results illustrate that our method can appropriately estimate the bandwidth requirements of the different classes based on DiffServ framework, reasonably plan bandwidth capacity of the network links, and promise multi-service QoS provisioning without overburden always in the BREAN.