Medium-Granular Modeling On The Engineering Cost Of IP Network Within China Telecommunications Market

It is the rapidly changed telecommunication techniques and the inherent information asymmetry between operators and regulators that makes it rather difficult to estimate the accurate cost of regulated operators.In contrast to the commonly used cost distribution approach, which is based on accounting records,the bottom-up engineering cost analysis does not rely on accounting system, alleviates the problem of asymmetric information, and is leading a more accurate prospect of the forward-looking cost.Since the nineties of the 20th century, the approach of bottom-up engineering cost analysis within telecommunications industry was developing, evolving and gradually became mature in the United States.Under the guidance, Germany, France, Japan and some other countries have established their own telecom network cost models consequently, which is used to support the decision process of certain telecommunications regulation policy. When it comes to China, the telecommunications regulation agency and relevant scholars has been working on the subject for nearly ten years,and made great effort to localize foreign engineering cost models for telecommunications network.Generally speaking, overseas'researches concerning on telecommunications engineering cost commonly underestimated the potential impact of IP technology on the cost structure.One dominant opinion believes that despite of some adjustments, the engineering cost model for traditional telecommunications network is far from out of date and could still be used to describe the real cost structure of telecom-munications network nowadays'or in the short future.For China telecommunications regulation researches,however, although the potential impact of rapid changed technologies,IP technology in particular, on the network cost structure has been rising great attention,and a specific IP MAN engineering cost model has already been established, there is few breakthrough on the accuracy of modeling approaches or processes.For this reason, none of the current models can lead to a satisfactory result of the real network cost structure. In general, the urgent problem that China telecommunications network engineering cost analysis confronts with is to refine the engineering cost model.When it comes to regulation, it is urgent to establish a forward-looking engineering cost model with more accuracy concerning on IP telecommunications network.The dissertation innovatively employs the granular computing theory to conduct the system modeling towards the telecommunications network engineering process system.Taking system modeling as a granulating procedure, a granularity-based theoretical system is established for evaluating the accuracy of the modeling approach and modeling process (i.e.granulating process).In the dissertation, LECOM and HCPM is taken as the representative model with coarse and fine granularity, and a detailed comparison is made from three dimensions which are the design of simulation scenario, the cost structure of network elements and the description of the engineering process.Based on the comparison, the definition of model's granularity is achieved from three aspects.Since model with fine granularity (i.e.HCPM) has stringent requirements on the input data, this dissertation gives up the idea to design a fine-granular telecommunications network engineering cost model,and makes effort on balancing the accuracy and feasibility between LECOM and HCPM.In the third chapter, the concept of medium-granular model is innovatively proposed, according to which the following system modeling processes is developed.In order to make up the deficiency on the theory background, the dissertation makes a detailed description of the system boundary, elements and relations within the domain of IP telecommunications network engineering process system from the perspective of systems science.Based on these definitions, a comprehensive blueprint for IP network engineering cost optimization model is established. Under this blueprint, the dissertation is committed to make breakthrough from the granularity of design of simulation scenario, the cost structure of network elements and the description of the engineering process.For the dimension of simulation scenario designing, subscriber unit is creatively introduced to describe the characteristics of the target telecommunications market.All of the characteristics related to land, district,subscriber and market structure is taken as the additional properties of the locations of subscriber unit.With more accuracy than LECOM, this modeling approach has medium granularity.For the dimension of cost structure of network elements, detailed discussion on system elements helps the model refine the description.Either the types of network elements or the scales for cost statistics of network elements exceed the boundary of coarse granularity. For the dimension of description of telecom network engineering processes,the wiring approach used by HCPM and the center office optimization algorithm employed by LECOM is combined,not only balances the flexibility and accuracy of the model,but also make sure that our model is superior in all the three dimensions and is improved to be a medium-granular telecommunications network engineering cost model.In. the case of that necessary data is a rather scarce resource, the theoretical system of medium-granular model could lead a better modeling process on the engineering cost of telecommunications network. As far as China telecommunications industry is concerned, for which a large-scale industrial restructuring is undergoing, "triple play" is ready and operators transform to all business,the medium-granular IP network engineering cost model established in this dissertation could achieve an even better prospect of the forward-looking cost of telecommunications network.