ABSTRACT
Operational research and data analytics techniques have been applied in telecommunication in many forms over the years. Some of the key decisions that need to be taken in are: (1) What is the optimal placement of network devices and data across the network for efficient access by application? (2) What should be the capacity of the data storage distributed across the network? (3) When and how should the data flow from the storage to the application (and from the application to the storage)? (4) What are the recent telecommunication applications in areas such as humanitarian and healthcare operations? Some of these problems have proven to be NP-hard. Consequently, these problems have been addressed by developing mathematical programming models and finding the near-optimal solutions. With the recent popularization of cloud-based virtualized systems, these problems have received renewed interest in the newer context. Traditional network analysis has long since been restricted to local areas or within a limited geographical distribution. However, with the popularization of cloud-based systems, the placement and management of data and resources have spread across a globally distributed network. So, addressing the problems related to optimization of network applications in cloud environments requires a fresh look. Operations management is in a strong position to deal with these new applications.
