Optimal deployment of power reserves across telecom critical infrastructures

Two of the fundamental critical national infrastructures, upon which all others rely heavily, are power and telecom. Emergency services, banking and finance, water, agriculture and food, the chemical industry, defense industrial base, public health, and government cannot run effectively without them for any sustained period of time. As a key infrastructure, central to all others, understanding and modeling the risk due to communications disruption is a high priority in order to enhance public safety and infrastructure resiliency This paper presents an optimization model for deploying backup generator power within next-generation networks, which are deployed in an increasingly mobile, multi-service, and multi-vendor environment. It also examines how power reserves might be optimally deployed in the mobile telecom infrastructure during power disruptions or blackouts, in order to minimize the cascading of disruptions in the power infrastructure into the wider communications infrastructure. We will describe an example development of these coupled infrastructure models and their application to the analysis of a power disruption or blackout across a metropolitan area. (C) 2008 Alcatel-Lucent.