Telecommunications - central to our daily lives - continues to change dramatically. These changes are the result of technological advances, deregulation, the proliferation of broadband service offers, and the spectacular popularity of the Internet and wireless services. In such adynamic technological and economic environment, competition is increasing among service providers and among equipment manufacturers. Consequently, optimization of the planning process is becoming essential. Although telecommunications network planning has been tackled by the Operations Research community for some time, many fundamental problems remain challenging. Through its fourteen chapters, this book covers some new and some still challenging older problems which arise in the planning of telecommunication networks. Telecommunications Network Planning will benefit both telecommunications practitioners looking for efficient methods to solve their problems and operations researchers interested in telecommunications. The book examines network design and dimensioning problems; it explores Operation Research issues related to a new standard Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM); it overviews problems that arise when designing survivable SDH/SONET Networks; it considers some broadband network problems; and it concludes with three chapters on wireless and mobile networks. Leading area researchers have contributed their recent research on the telecommunications and network topics treated in the volume.
