Combining Network Economics and Engineering Over Several Scales

We have developed models and techniques for combining network economics and engineering over several scales of time and size, of which three will be described in the talk. In the longest time scale, we consider strategic planning for optical transport networks. The pace of technological innovations in networking is high, and this will continue to lead to accelerated ("disruptive") capacity increases and sharply decreasing unit costs. In the second, shorter, time scale, we fix the network infrastructure, and consider some of the issues facing the service provider in offering multiple services, such as voice and data. In the third, shortest, time scale the network infrastructure is again held fixed. The main new element is the presence of demand uncertainty, which gives rise to a stochastic traffic engineering framework for bandwidth provisioning and route selection.