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Regional Comparisons of Critical Telecommunication Infrastructure Resiliency Based on Outage Data

Authors:
Andrew P. Snow
John C. Hoag
Gary R. Weckman
Naga T. Gallamudi
William A. Young

Keywords: Resiliency; FEMA; telecommunication outage; critical infrastructure.

Abstract:
The resiliency of telecommunication infrastructure by US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) region, is presented, based on almost 9,000 telecommunication outages over a 14 year period. Executive policy organizations in the US have described a resilient infrastructure as one that can minimize the magnitude and/or duration of service disruptions. To that end an empirical assessment of resiliency is made by region using telecommunication outages, each of which has duration and magnitude (the number of users affected by the outage). Wireline central offices are essential to telecommunication infrastructure, as they house local switching, transmission, and user access infrastructure for both voice and data services, including the Public Switched Telephone System (PSTN), the Internet, mobile communications, and emergency communication. Central office resiliency is studied by proxy, examining local telephone switch outages in those offices over 14 years. Regional comparisons are first made using classic time-series-of-event reliability techniques, allowing reliability trend comparisons. Next, outage cause comparisons are made. Then, a resiliency metric is presented that allows a fair comparison between regions differing in population. Marked differences in resiliency trends are apparent in some FEMA regions.

Pages: 13 to 19

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2017

Publication date: April 23, 2017

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4022

ISBN: 978-1-61208-550-0

Location: Venice, Italy

Dates: from April 23, 2017 to April 27, 2017