Bandwidth demand growing exponentially for years while revenue per bit is dropping causes service provider margins to diminish. When combining this trend with unpredictable traffic patterns and a peak-to-average traffic ratio that is increasing quickly due to the adoption of cloud computing and social media applications, technology that will help service providers to streamline their operations and reduce total cost of ownership is needed badly.
In order to solve this issue, communication networks have to provide more capacity, become more dynamic when activating new services and need to be more flexible in terms of design and configuration. The mainstream trend of offering real-time applications based on a virtualized IT infrastructure – such as server and storage – has a clear impact on the underlying network infrastructure and its topology. Networks have to be designed and built differently in order to provide connectivity more dynamically and to better utilize resources available in the network. Connection paths have to be optimized and shortened to avoid wasting of resources and reduce latency.
The core network is in the center of our communication landscape and therefore the technology applied to build it. A more integrated approach of deploying IP/MPLS and optical network layer is seen as a possible solution in the industry. Such architecture would be more flexible and dynamic to adapt to changes in traffic patterns and services. It would deliver the functionality needed with fewer nodes, would adapt to rapid changes in both traffic pattern and volume, support automation, and most importantly would be simple to ensure operational efficiency.
The agile optical network is a key component for this evolutionary process. Optical networks deployed today are rather static and do not allow such levels of flexibility and efficiency. With the introduction of coherent intradyne detection for 100G transmission and optical amplifiers purpose-built for a native 100G transmission layer, network capacity, reach and flexibility by far exceeds the performance of a conventional optical network solution. The addition of contentionless and gridless ROADM technology provides the flexibility enabled by the new optical layer design. And last but not least, service-based provisioning enabled by control plane integration between optical and IP/MPLS layer delivers the level of network automation necessary to instantly react to changes in traffic volume and pattern.
No question, the aforementioned optical networking technologies are important enablers for next-generation core networks. They constitute the agile optical core when combined together and integrated in a single platform – an optical networking architecture that delivers new levels of scale, flexibility, simplicity and therefore efficiency. Or as Andrew Schmitt from Infonetics Research puts it: There is a coming optical reboot. A rebuilding of core networks focusing on 100G coherent transmission, next-generation ROADM and GMPLS control plane technology.
Read more on this topic here: Agile Core Transport