Towards the Development of Network Service Cost Modeling-An ISP Perspective
Abstract
Accurate network costing provides insightful information to any ISP for better network planning, profits, and decision making. Developing precise cost models for communication network services has always been a challenge for Internet Service Providers (ISP) due to the complex nature of today’s advanced shared cloud and network infrastructure. Currently, developing and maintaining such cost models require significant effort and time for the network planners in an ISP. The proposed novel methodology reduces the development cycle time significantly for the cost model, which leads to the ISP’s operational cost savings. We also experimented with K-means clustering for grouping router costs in the study, which provided similar unit cost results. To prove the operational savings, we evaluated a quantitative example considering the current practice as well as our proposed methods. We considered three network services: IPVPN service, Transport Lease service, and High-Speed Internet service for the experiments. We conducted simulations, and estimated service unit costs to validate the accuracy and effectiveness of our proposed approaches. We have compared results from proposed strategies with the existing cost mechanism and computed the performance improvement cost gap for different network sizes. This cost gap (delta) exhibited that the difference between the service cost values is significantly negligible, which proved the efficiency of our cost model.