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Wide Area Network Design : Concepts and Tools for Optimization

Robert Cahn / Hardcover / Published 1998

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Review written by Peter Vincent, Vinntec Limited

This is a book which deals with how real wide area network design problems are tackled - and how computer-aided network design tools and methodologies can be used to help make the right decisions. An error of only a few percent can cost tens of thousands of pounds a month in some cases - as can squeezing the last economy out of a design so that it needs to be upgraded as soon as it is implemented! Network design is a process of resolving conflicts - performance and reliability objectives versus cost constraints. This book provides a set of Design Principles throughout the text which have proved useful over many years - as well as the occasional War Story... My article in the Local Links Business Library on WAN Topology Design shows a simple example of the sort of tool we are talking about here.

I worked with Bob some years ago while he was developing an implementation of the "MEsh Network Topology Optimization and Routing" MENTOR algorithm (see Aaron Kershenbaum's Telecommunications Network Design Algorithms). It is no surprise that MENTOR itself occupies a large part of the text and is implemented - with other techniques described in the book - in an accompanying Windows 95/98/NT tool called "DeLite". Source code for the algorithms used by the tools is also available via the Internet.

If you have comments about this review or about the Local Links Network Design Bookshop, please contact me - peter_vincent@vinntec.co.uk