A brief review of the state of the art in Operational Research in Telecommunications

Nowadays operational research (OR) claims to be known as the science of better by the scientific community and by the industry. OR provides a set of techniques and tools for thinking, analysing and solving, which leads to taking decisions in a structured and focused way towards efficiency and optimality. Due to these aspects, the advance of telecommunications research has been strongly linked to operations research since its birth. With this paper we want to acknowledge the serious research carried out in telecommunications from operations research and to encourage an ongoing telecommunications research from an OR perspective and linked to real practice. A classification of the state of the art Currently, there is a wide range of research possibilities in telecommunications that can be classified according to the type of telecommunications network. For example, wirebased telecommunication systems (including interurban networks, or urban networks among others), wireless and mobile communications, satellite-based communication, etc. Other possible classification is according to the stage of operation state. For example, the planning stage that is sometimes called topological design, or the real time operation stage including traffic demand dynamic routing, communication admission control, and bandwidth allocation among other typical problems. Although topological design has been the most traditional problem in the OR community, other problems like dynamic routing or bandwidth allocation are gaining support in certain specialized research groups. Table 1 shows a list of references that can be used as a quick access guide to each addressed