Practical Approaches for Software Components Integration in Telecommunications

Nowadays, advances in telecommunication network design and performance analysis often rely on dedicated software tools. Unfortunately, developing new tools is a very time and resources consuming activity. To rationalise development costs, existing applications can be extended. Alternatively, existing software components can be combined and integrated. Integration of heterogeneous components requires many efforts, in particular when the specific input/output data formats have to be adapted. Furthermore, the amount of data exchanged between the components can be huge and needs intermediate processing. To facilitate data exchange between tools, two concepts are presented in this paper: CostGlue and the Multilayer Network Description (MND). Their utilisation modes and the advantages they provide are illustrated through a practical example.