Describes a generic interface through which a planning tool or design aid can be connected to a telecommunications network. In today's complex and ever-changing networks, network operators need to plan their networks very accurately and rapidly. Sacrificing accuracy generally has severe impacts on the scalability and maintainability of the network at a later stage. A proliferation of planning algorithms/tools exists in both the literature and industry today: these implement advanced algorithms and supply complex answers. It has been our experience that these calculations seldom have any direct use in reducing network costs through optimising network configuration in practice. The key to unlocking the benefits of these planning algorithms lies in making the network planning process a generic open standards-based and closed-loop process, through the implementation of generic interfaces which abstract the information required away from the physical network details. This paper describes the design of such an interface, which was then implemented in a conceptual evaluation environment in order to gauge the complexity and practicality of the interface concept. We use the capabilities of Java and CORBA to achieve the necessary scalability and portability. The Generic Network Planning Interface (GNPI) concept is shown to be powerful enough to abstract the network information into generic network objects and to provide standard method calls to access these objects in a distributed environment.
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