The evolution of telecommunications technology has always challenged the industry to cope with the rapid pace of innovation and demand. The actual panorama offers a view of network operators constantly pushed to minimize their expenses while keeping profitability. Due to that, a keen interest on applying business intelligence methods has appeared - an approach that encompasses the particularities of technology, thus named techno-economic analysis. Based on this framework, this work proposes a novel approach to modeling and studying a particular process, the service migration between platforms. The need for migration of telecommunication platforms stems from the constant technological progress and has become a focus of savings and new business opportunities. The proposed service migration model uses the hill climbing solution to find the best scenario for a given number of involved employees. The paper presents a collection of case studies, which cover the most important aspects of the migration process and suggest how network operators can increase their benefits. Additionally, the network dismantling - the very end of a network lifecycle - is also analyzed and simulated. Our approach aims at a deeper look into the operation of a telecommunications company, identifies the main cost drivers and extracts recommendations to an improved network management.

Increased competition in the telecommunications industry pushes network operators to rationalize their total costs. Models and simulations appear as major tools aiming at better understanding the expenditures and to allow a more realistic network planning. However, their focus was, in the past, mostly limited to infrastructure investments. Because emerging services pose special requirements towards the networks, operators have not only to extend the capacity of their transport networks, but also need to optimize the architecture for differentiated services with advanced packet switching technologies, referred to as Next Generation Networks (NGN). During network evolution with disruptive technology changes, a general problem faced by network operators is the service migration of active services from an existing platform into a newly setup platform. This work investigates strategies for service migration at minimized overall operational costs. A novel service migration cost model based on queueing theory and hill climbing optimization is provided in order to tackle the employee allocation optimization problem. Based on this framework, a thorough techno-economic analysis of costs and benefits is presented.

In future multilayer packet circuit networks, the traffic engineering (TE) apparatus is foreseen as a fundamental (logically independent) toolset, which carries out TE tasks, taking into account the operators operational considerations and fulfilling their TE constraints. The TE toolset relies on the generalized multi-protocol label switching (GMPLS) suite of protocols; its description is provided in terms of its functional scope and properties. Next a new TE element (TeE) is proposed that complements the existing TE toolset and its delivered features. Finally, this paper analyzes and compares the architectural and implementation options for the TeE logical entity

Optical systems and technologies have been radically changing the telecommunication networks for past 15 years; today wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology, optical amplifiers, and simple optical switching elements like optical add-drop multiplexers (OADMs) are used in the backbone networks of all operators worldwide. Optical systems nowadays provide the basis for cost-effective transmission of large amounts of bandwidth over the Internet, and will enable its future growth and the spreading of new applications and services. This paper summarizes the main trends in optical networking and investigates potential future application areas. Optical system technology has become so pervasive in network design that it needs to be considered in the context of provisioning new applications and services. Therefore, the analysis is not limited to the aspects of physical transmission, but also takes into account recent developments in integrated network design as well as network control and management. The following sections describe the key functionalities of future optical network architectures, and the key findings of the theoretical analysis are supported by the results of a field trial of advanced transmission technology