End-users demand for more bandwidth, higher reliability, access anywhere and any time, which is forcing operators to upgrade their networks faster. On the other hand, the number of players in the telecom arena is increasing. From the single player existing in the 90’s, the telecom arena contains now a plethora of players with differing domains, areas, targeted customers, service portfolio, etc. Hence, operators nowadays are facing a stronger market competition, which impact their number of customers, expected revenues, etc. This new market scenario encourages operators to keep their service portfolio up-to-date as well as to upgrade their network to cope with all the new services, users, requirements, etc. Since both, competition and regulation limit the revenues of the offered services, the best way for operators to keep their benefits is to reduce their costs. For that purpose, Techno-Economic (TE) analyses are required. TE analysis of communications networks is a rather young research area. This work helps to provide the basis for such studies contributing with new cost models, TE frameworks for migration and protection, as well as extending metrics for TE assessment. TE analysis embraces several aspects such as modelling, dimensioning and evaluation. This work presents for the first time, an overall and generic methodology for TE analysis, which is then adapted to different studies and at the end, it is applied to particular case studies. TE analysis is supported by two main pillars: technology and economics. The first one holds the knowledge of telecommunication networks: technologies, implementation issues, limitations and allows proposing new solutions to overcome them. In this work, new contributions are proposed to e.g., reduce migration costs, increase the connection availability, and reduce the energy consumption of access networks. The second pillar provides the knowledge on economic metrics and models (e.g., cost models). This work applies different models to more complex operational expenditures as well as to the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) evaluation. This work also provides a complete set of measures to consistently compare different protection schemes. Most of the work focuses on access networks (together with aggregation networks in case of node consolidation). These networks are actually the bottleneck of the bandwidth delivery chain towards the user. The first contribution in this work develops a methodology to evaluate the cost of different Next Generation Optical Access networks in any type of area. This methodology allows comparing different solutions for various scenarios (with and without node consolidation, greenfield vs. brownfield scenarios, different user densities, etc.). Since most of the existing operators deploy optical networks at some point (Fiber To The x (FTTx)), this initial framework is further extended to evaluate and compare different migration strategies towards solutions offering at least 300 Mbps per user as expected in 2020. The proposed framework allows to identify the best migration time, duration, expected costs, etc. Triggered by the new access requirements regarding connection availability, the framework is also applied to protection schemes. The new framework enables to consider different protection schemes and compare other metrics than cost (e.g., connection availability, failure impact factor). Access networks aim at interconnecting the central office to end points of the same type and requirements. In this way, operators have to run various access networks simultaneously (one for each types of end points): an access network for residential users, another one to interconnect Base Stations, etc. However, new optical architectures (e.g., Hybrid Passive Optical Network as an extension of NG-PON2 [1]) allows coping with an heterogeneous combination of end points (e.g., residential users, business users, Macro Base Stations, Small Cells). These networks, referred as converged access networks simplify the complexity of having several operational networks. The fact that converged access networks support different end points implies also an increase of connection availability requirements as for example, required by Macro Base Stations or business users. Despite the reluctance of operators to invest on access network protection, this work proposes different schemes that with limited increase of cost achieve at least one 9 more on connection availability. This work contributes also with new protection schemes which have been compared in different areas using several proposed metrics. Moreover, access networks have been identified as the most consuming network segment [2]. The proposed protection schemes have been modified so that they are compatible with energy saving schemes in order to find a compromise between connection availability and low energy consumption. In addition to access networks, which constitute the main part of this study, core networks are also addressed in this work from different perspectives: (i) as optical core networks that will run out of capacity and will need a network capacity extension ; (ii) as failure reparation has been identified as a main operational cost, how operators can reduce this cost; (iii) Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV)planning taking costs into account. The methodologies proposed for the TE analysis of new solution evaluation, network migration and comparison of different solutions can be directly applied to new studies or easily adapted to other domains as for example network virtualization.     «

End-users demand for more bandwidth, higher reliability, access anywhere and any time, which is forcing operators to upgrade their networks faster. On the other hand, the number of players in the telecom arena is increasing. From the single player existing in the 90’s, the telecom arena contains now a plethora of players with differing domains, areas, targeted customers, service portfolio, etc. Hence, operators nowadays are facing a stronger market competition, which impact their number of custo...     »