Assessing the robustness of steering decisions to the uncertainty of roaming traffic forecasts

The paper focuses on the international wholesale roaming market and the strategic problem, for a multinational group of mobile network operators, of making steering decisions based on uncertain traffic forecasts. The subsidiaries of the multinational group aim at optimizing their costs by distributing their subscribers travelling abroad between the partner operators of the visited countries, and subsequently distributing the roaming traffic. However there is uncertainty in the expected wholesale roaming cost at the end of the year due to inaccurate roaming traffic forecasts. We propose an approach for i) measuring the impact of the worst-case traffic forecasts scenario on the nominal steering decisions in terms of forecasted cost, ii) computing the steering decisions minimizing the worst-case roaming cost and thus assessing the robustness of the nominal steering decisions by comparison. Experiments show the impacts of the uncertainty modeling on the nominal steering decisions.