Operations Research for Reliable and Sustainable Telecommunication Networks

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The Internet and Internet-related technologies and networks are in a stage of profound transformation on several fronts.First, there has been a remarkable proliferation of social networking and wireless applications.Second, a significant increase in Video Applications both in wireless and in wireline networks is being forecasted in the coming years. These changes have an important impact on the nature of the traffic and on network reliability and performance, as very high-bandwidth applications, such as High Definition Video or real time gaming, gain popularity and have to compete for bandwidth with other more traditional applications such as data and voice.In the past, the classical answer of Service Providers to every new leap in bandwidth consuming applications has been network over-dimensioning. Moreover, to insure real-time reliability and performance, we have witnessed the increased redundancy of network elements,such as servers farms and routers. However, such a trend is no longer sustainable for the following reasons:1) Most of the traffic is shifting to the wireless medium, with its severe spectrum limitations that limits the bandwidth available for the forthcoming applications.2) The energy consumption and environmental impact of the Internet and the ICT (Internet and Communication Technology) is no longer negligible and is expected to increase exponentially if the growth is not carefully contained. As a result, we are facing new types of operational and planning problems that can be solved only with a deep understanding of the networking concepts at hand and a careful crafting of Operational Research modelling and techniques.The object of this proposal is, in the short term, to identify, explore and model the different types of problems that come from this new difficult reality of new type of traffic and increased growth with restricted resources. In the long term, the objective is to find effective resolution approaches to be able to deal with real-life instances of these problems.