European deregulation had opened up hitherto inaccessible markets and prices for high-bandwidth network technologies were becoming cost effective, as demand for high-bandwidth services increased. In such conditions the business case for the rapid deployment of large-scale optical dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) and synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) networks across Europe was irresistible. At its height, Europe boasted in excess of 25 such networks, at varying degrees of development and scale. All these new network operators had something in common. They were all effectively building new networks on a 'greenfield' basis, and were developing the teams and tools to build and manage their networks almost from scratch. One such operator was BT's pan-European network deployment, then known as Farland and now called Transborder Pan-European Network (TPEN).What follows in this chapter is a description of the Utilisator tool from the point of view of the people and teams that use the tool the most. It describes the information upon which the tool draws to provide its outputs, the views and direct outputs that result from using the tool, and, perhaps most importantly, how this resultant information can be used within the business to facilitate decision making.

Core transport network design and capacity planning tasks have become increasingly complex over the recent past due to a number of factors. These include: the explosive growth in broadband product offerings, driving the migration from narrowband to broadband transport network architectures; the range of technologies that can be applied in the core transport arena, including SDH point-to-point, shared protection rings and optical WDM - in fact, the BT network consists of all these technologies as well as the legacy PDH network; the scale of the network - the BT core network infrastructure consists of over 10 000 switches and 20 000 connections, which makes manual planning processes virtually impossible.

When modelling synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) networks it is usual to consider the algorithms responsible for the planning of these networks. These algorithms are well defined and consider a wide range of inputs describing the network scenario, including the demands of the network, the configuration of nodes, available physical layer capacity as well as restrictions placed on the design by various technological issues. During planning it is also common to incorporate deliberate structures such as rings to achieve additional attributes such as resilience. Hierarchies are also used in the network to make the management of capacity easier. This chapter begins by examining the overall telecommunications system and its constituent layers. It then briefly describes the macroscopic traits found in the Internet, an example of one of the layers, the Internet protocol (IP) layer, and then demonstrates the existence of these traits in a deployed SDH network. Additional traits to those found in the Internet are then illustrated, including some describing topology, bandwidth distribution and geographic connectivity.

In almost all other areas of telecommunications, modelling is devoted to determining the equilibrium mean behaviour of a system. Random fluctuations and perturbations are distracting factors which possibly must be allowed for, but that is done by robustness studies, or a series of planned variations to see the impact that they have around some fixed point. If possible, it is preferable to eliminate their effects at the outset. For performance, by contrast, it is the randomness that is the core feature to be studied: the entire area is devoted to examining the quantitative effect that randomness of input or environment has upon a system or network. This means that performance models need a degree of accuracy which is unique among modelling techniques. Not only must they represent with considerable accuracy the target system being studied, but, in order to quantify what are essentially second-order effects.

The Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) has been designed to support real-time services including both multimedia and packet data services. Multimedia in UMTS means that the simultaneous transfer of speech, data, text, pictures, audio and video with a maximum data rate of 2 Mbit/s will be possible. Simultaneous use of several applications raises the demands for mechanisms which can guarantee quality of service (QoS) for each application. UMTS provides several radio resource management (RRM) [2] strategies to the QoS requirements. Some services do not have stringent delay requirements. This opens up the area of using the radio resources efficiently while guaranteeing a certain target QoS and maintaining the planned coverage and capacity of the network. Within the UMTS bearer service, the radio bearer service covers all aspects of radio interface transport [3]. The main focus of this chapter is the RRM strategies used in the radio bearer service.

This section explores a security protocol that is simultaneously less aggressive and more 'intelligent'. The main objective of this work is to promote a vision of information insurance that fits in to the bigger picture and does not disregard structural changes to focus exclusively on minor case-by-case adjustments. When the Internet took off in the mid-1990s, an evolutionary process started that is literally turning networks inside out - no more fixed boundaries to protect, no more convenient access points from where to conduct all security checks.