Telecom Critical Infrastructure Simulations: Discrete-Event Simulation vs. Dynamic Simulation How Do They Compare?

Critical national infrastructures for power, emergency services, finance, and other basic industries rely heavily on information and telecommunications networks (voice, data, and video) to provide services and conduct business. The telecommunication network is recognized by the federal government as one of the critical national infrastructures that must be maintained and protected against debilitating attacks. This paper describes a comparison between two simulation models of the voice telecommunications infrastructure for a metropolitan area for both wireline and wireless networks with millions of subscribers. One simulation is a very detailed discrete- event call-by-call simulation model, and the second is a higher level time-based system dynamics model. The purpose of these models is to investigate the availability of the telecom infrastructure under disruptions. The results show that the higher level system dynamics models can successfully match the summary results of the more detailed model and can be run several orders of magnitude faster.