Telecommunications—A Revolution in Progress

Putting together a special issue of the ORSA journal that concentrates on the application of operations research in telecommunications was a pleasant task of assembling some of the best papers on different modeling and analysis techniques. At the same time, it was disappointing to realize how little operation researchers know about recent and emerging developments in the field and the opportunities they present for innovative research applied to telecommunication problems. In an attempt to remedy this situation, I decided to accomplish two tasks in writing the preface: To present and highlight some of the important research issues in telecommunications vying for contributions by operation researchers, applied mathematicians, and economists, and to link them, in the appropriate places, to the papers published in the special issue.