To model the telecommunications infrastructure and its role and robustness to shocks, we must characterize the business and engineering of telecommunications systems in the year 2003 and beyond. By analogy to environmental systems modeling, we seek to develop a "conceptual model" for telecommunications.Here, the conceptual model is a list of high-level assumptions consistent with the economic and engineering architectures of telecommunications suppliers and customers, both today and in the near future. We describe the present engineering architectures of the most popular service offerings, and describe the supplier markets in some detail. We also develop a characterization of the customer base for telecommunications services and project its likely response to disruptions in service, base-lining such conjectures against observed behaviors during 9/11. 4 CaveatTelecommunications over the last 20 years has experienced more technology and market change than, say, aviation has in 40 years or the railroads in 100 years. Nuclear technologies over the last 30 years seem positively moribund compared to the rate of change in information technologies. Water resources and many other technologies have never experienced the same absolute amount or rate of change. Only computer technologies have experienced an equivalent rate of change in the last 50 years. Noting that, it is easy to find predictions from computer technology leaders in the 1960s and 1970s that seem quaint or laughable today. This should warn any modeler away from an uncritical reading of this or any other document that purports to accurately characterize future (and even present) states of such a fast-changing technology, much less customer response to these technologies. There are future equilibrium states, e.g., open-spectrum proposals, that may eventually lead to some maturation and relative stability in telecommunications, but how and when we will arrive at such states is more speculation than science. The seersucker hypothesis has not been disproved by this study, that hypothesis being that for every seer, there is a sucker.5
CommAspen is a new agent-based model for simulating the interdependent effects of market decisions and disruptions in the telecommunications infrastructure on other critical infrastructures in the U.S. economy such as banking and finance, and electric power. CommAspen extends and modifies the capabilities of Aspen-EE, an agent-based model previously developed by Sandia National Laboratories to analyze the interdependencies between the electric power system and other critical infrastructures. CommAspen has been tested on a series of scenarios in which the communications network has been disrupted, due to congestion and outages. Analysis of the scenario results indicates that communications networks simulated by the model behave as their counterparts do in the real world. Results also show that the model could be used to analyze the economic impact of communications congestion and outages.4
The objective of this research was the development of tools and techniques for the identification of critical nodes within critical infrastructures. These are nodes that, if disrupted through natural events or terrorist action, would cause the most widespread, immediate damage.
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