Simulating the National Telephone Network: A Socio-technical Approach to Assessing Infrastructure Criticality

We describe the concepts and key results of an end-to-end simulation of the national telephone network developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory; we model and simulate the wireline and cellular phone networks of the entire continental United States on a call-by-call resolution using a socio-technical modeling paradigm. The simulation suite-MIITS-P (Multi-Scale Integrated Information and Telecommunications System-Phone sector) has the following conceptual building blocks (i) a network generation module that models each of approximately 25,000 PSTN and cell phone wire-centers and their connections based on industry data, (ii) a session generation module that generates individual calls between end-user devices based on US census data and surveys on end-user calling behavior, and (iii) the actual simulator module that routes the calls over the network imitating real-life routing algorithms as closely as possible. Scaling to a national level, which means simulating a total of about 10 billion calls is made possible through MIITS-P's use of discrete-event distributed simulation technology that runs on computing clusters. Using MIITS-P, we present results on a nation-wide scale, ranking the economic values of each wire-center based on the number of call-seconds routed over a 24 hour period.