A techno-economic approach to telecommunications: the case of service migration
Dayyan Shayani, Carmen Mas Machuca, Monika Jäger · IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management · 2010
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.