Paving the Way Toward Software-Defined Infrastructures

Antonio Manzalini, Chair, IEEE SDN Initiative

 

SDN and NFV are facets of an overall systemic transformation called “softwarization” which is steering the evolution not only of Networks, but also Service Platforms (e.g., Cloud and Edge Computing architectures) and future terminals, machines and smart things.

Software-Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) are two paradigms that have been known for the past couple of decades, even if with different names (e.g., Active Networking, Programmable Networks, etc): basically they are about the separation of hardware from software and IT virtualization. Importantly, today, these paradigms are garnering a new dramatic attention due to the current techno-economic drivers (e.g., pervasive diffusion of ultra-broadband, increasing performance of chipsets and IT hardware, growing availability of open source software) which are making SDN and NFV exploitable and sustainable in telecommunications.

SDN is fundamentally based on the separation of the software from the hardware. For example, the separation of the control plane of a router from the packet forwarding function in the data plane. In principle, this is applicable to any node of a network such as a switch, a router or even transmission equipment. Another key characteristic of SDN is the possibility of executing software control instructions outside of the traditional specialized network elements, e.g. in standard IT hardware. This means also that a data center filled with general purpose IT servers could execute the control of remote specialized boxes or even network management. NFV regards the virtualization of network functions (e.g., middle-boxes of telecommunications networks) and their dynamic allocation and execution on (almost) general purpose hardware (e.g., x86). It is clear that SDN and NFV are not directly dependent, but they are mutually beneficial: in fact, when they deployed together, they are amplifying the innovation impact on a telecommunications infrastructure.

But we argued that SDN and NFV are more than that: they are two of the facets of an overall systemic transformation called “softwarization” which is steering the evolution not only of Networks, but also Service Platforms (e.g., Cloud and Edge Computing architectures) and future terminals, machines and smart things. Service providers and network operators embracing this vision will see cost reductions, improved operations efficiency and dramatically reduced time to market when providing current and future Information Communications Technology (ICT) services (e.g., immersive communications, artificially intelligent avatars, advanced social networking). But this not enough: Software-Defined Infrastructures (SDIs) should be pervasive and flexible enough to enable radically new service paradigms such as anything-as-a-service: then smart devices, machines, drones and robots will become the terminals of the future, just like “nervous terminations” embedded into the Digital Society. This will mean huge impacts in industrial and agricultural automation, in improving effectiveness in public processes, in saving energy, reducing pollution, etc.

Two main strategies are being adopted for exploiting the “softwarization” in telecommunications. One (called Red Ocean) is based on a relatively slow innovation cycle and it is aiming at a smooth evolution of current legacy infrastructures towards SDN/NFV. This approach runs the risk of being delayed by the standardization of interfaces with legacy systems as well as by the need of updating current Operation and Business Support Systems (OSS and BSS) in order to cope with SDN-NFV advanced features. The other strategy (called Blue Ocean) is based on an open and fast innovation cycle that exploits a parallel SDI in order to create new services markets and ecosystems that go far beyond current competition rules. In this case, rather than getting delayed by trying to integrate new technologies with legacy systems, innovation is disruptively adopted through a “softwarization sandbox;” eventually the transitions from legacy to SDI will be gradual and on a service-by-service basis. In some cases, these two strategies may co-exist, with open source software likely to be the common denominator.

Telecommunications and ICT ecosystems will be profoundly reshaped by this SDI transformation. This recent research report predicts software will disrupt more and more industries. In the meantime the transition to SDI comes with a number of challenges:

• Defining a reference functional model/architecture for SDI;
• Automation of operations processes (as current OSS/BSS cannot easily scale);
• Interoperability between “softwarization sandbox” and legacy infrastructures;
• Best practice, specifications and methods for performance testing and validations;
• Designing security for SDI;
• Defining new biz models and addressing regulations aspects;
• Educating about the change of culture being introduced by “softwarization”;
• Anticipating the needs and creating the conditions for a pre-industrial adoption of “softwarization of telecommunications” through experiments and proof of concept.

Ultimately SDN and NFV will not be just another technological upgrade of telecommunication infrastructures; “softwarization” will be a systemic transformation of several other industries, and much more intertwined with socio-economic sustainability and policy regulations. Research, innovation and exploitation of “softwarization” will require global coherent efforts worldwide which are essential for creating a new socio-economic development for the Digital Society.

 

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Antonio Manzalini received the M. Sc. Degree in Electronic Engineering from the Politecnico of Turin. In 1990 he joined CSELT, which then became Telecom Italia Lab. He started his activities on research and development of technologies and architectures for future optical transport networks: in this context, he chaired ITU-T Questions contributing to the development of several ITU-T Recommendations on transport networks (e.g., SDH, OTN). He has covered several leading roles in European Commission funded projects on future networks. He served as TPC member of several IEEE Conference, and recently he was co-General Chair of EuCNC2014. His results are published in more than 110 papers. He is currently joining the Strategy and Innovation Dept. of Telecom Italia (Future Centre) addressing strategic scenarios and innovation activities mainly related to Software Defined Networks, Network Function Virtualization, Internet of Things and 5G. He is Chair of the IEEE SDN initiative.

 

Transform to a Network of the Future at Your Pace

Bosco Eduardo Fernandes, Independent consultant and Senior Strategic Advisor

 

What started in the ‘90s as the first multimode, multiband architectural Standard emerges for Radio access systems has since become an inevitable evolutionary base for today’s rigid Network infrastructure as traffic growth increases the costs and complexity of network operations. The underlying technologies can be leveraged to create a programmable, highly automated infrastructure. Virtual and physical assets are holistically managed and orchestrated as a single entity, creating simplicity out of potential chaos, with all resources available for maximum utilization and serving customer needs on demand. One of these next generation technologies is Software-Defined Network (SDN), which has complementary Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and cloud technologies that will increasingly be adopted by operators to help make networks more flexible and responsive to changes as required. They will be an integral part of the development of the IoT and in managing network resources to cope with the Big Data traffic generated.

In principle, the motivation for agile service creation, open networks and lowered cost of ownership, have resulted in innovations using SDN that integrates network resources to create a unified network operating system, making it possible for service providers to tailor connectivity according to a given application’s specific requirements – across multiple layers, domains, vendors, and technologies. By deploying an SDN solution that combines dynamic multi-layer (L0-L3) transport with dynamic control, service providers can transform their network and service-delivery model while also maximizing return on their embedded investments. In other words decouple topology, traffic and inter-layer dependencies enables dynamic multi-layer networking. Such a solution enables the now-programmable network to respond to applications. Using the network intelligence the network can update dynamically, in real time, to accommodate the needs of a given application. In this way one could say SDN is an architectural concept that encompasses the programmability of multiple network layers -- including management, network services, control, forwarding and transport planes -- to optimize the use of network resources, promote interoperability across suppliers and network layers, increase network agility, unleash service innovation, accelerate service time-to-market, extract business intelligence and ultimately enable dynamic, service-driven virtual networks.

SDN promises to deliver significant cost reductions and substantial competitive benefits, notably by enabling service providers to:

• respond to changing market environments by creating new applications and launching new services faster than today
• Use a Standardized reference functional model/architecture (levels, abstractions, interfaces) which is open and vendor-neutral to software.
• Satisfy end-user requirements for on-demand bandwidth in a significant and efficient manner
• Reduce operational complexity through network simplification and automation
• Reduce CAPEX and OPEX by:
  a) cutting provisioning times and
  b) enabling service providers to distribute loads, with maximum speed and efficiency, among the most appropriate network resources
• Extremely faster platform upgrade cycles at lower hardware cost
• Higher reliability and scalable performance by way of automation of Operations processes
• Extensively Secure “by design”
• Generate additional revenues

All the major carriers are still involved in evaluating and trialing SDN (software-defined networking) and NFV (network functions virtualization) however, they are rapidly moving towards becoming mainstream network. The momentum is strong, nevertheless, widespread commercial deployments where bigger parts of — let alone whole — networks are controlled by SDN will be deployed around 2016 through 2020.

Some of the hurdles:

There has been a tremendous amount of work across the industry in defining and developing use cases for both SDN and NFV, and it continues to be the number one topic of interest in our with service providers. Internal interest is high among providers, products abound, and well-defined use cases are proliferating, but in many cases the economics of commercialization are yet to be demonstrated. This is an area that will need much greater focus if SDN and NFV are to be successful.

Furthermore,

• Interoperability is not where it needs to be for ease of adoption and widespread SDN deployment. SDN controllers from different vendors are unlikely to work together. The focus today is on north-south managing of network gear rather than cooperation at the top.
• Getting started is tricky. Companies have invested heavily in particular vendors and their devices. It is unlikely that SDN comes in as a replacement to what is there; rather, it will likely be additive, “layered” on top of what already exists.
• What do you choose as the “right type” of SDN for your organization? There seems to be three flavors: overlay/additive; vendor-specific solutions using custom ASICs, with common APIs; and the “white-box” approach of relatively simple hardware acting as a commodity element designed to behave as switches, routers, etc., by their SDN controller. You need to know what kind of network flexibility makes the most sense for your environment, but there are still few guide posts for figuring this out.
• SDN software, including network apps, such as traffic analytics, and orchestration and controller software — is the critical piece that will convert a network into a software-defined network.
• Due to the newness of SDN technology and the fundamental changes it brings to networks, there is an incredible demand for expertise to design, deploy and operate SDN-based services, and carriers are looking to vendors for this expertise.
• It lacks a common set of interoperability standards for all network products, despite SDN's open heritage. Until these standards disputes are resolved, only early adopters whose businesses can't afford to live without a technology like SDN (think Google) will move forward with broad implementation. This doesn't mean that SDN shouldn't be on your IT roadmap.

First Market predictions

• In its recent report, IHS predicts service providers around the world will increase their spending on SDN software by 15 times from 2015 to 2019, as service providers worldwide seek service agility and operational efficiency in their networks to stay competitive.
• The global market for carrier software-defined networking (SDN) software, hardware and services is expected to grow from $103 million in 2014 to $5.7 billion in 2019, according to IHS.
• IHS expects outsourced services for SDN projects to grow at a 2014–2019 CAGR of 199 percent
• The study is consistent with another report IHS released in July, which predicted that the global NFV market will grow fivefold to $11.6 billion through 2019.
• Yet the market is still in the early stage “in the long-term, 10- to 15-year transformation of service provider networks to SDN,”

Three main areas of exploitation of SDN-NFV paradigms can be envisaged: Telecommunications Core Networks and the Edge Networks; Enterprise Networks- the more IT decision-makers and business leaders know about it, the better they'll be able to determine where and when to introduce it to their data centers; Clouds with this much investment going into product development, SDN will also assume an important role in IT infrastructure deployment.​​​

 

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Bosco Eduardo Fernandes received a Master’s (Dipl.Ing) degree in Electrical Engineering from the Munich University in 1974 and Executive MBA respectively in 1981. He is a member of the Internet Society, Senior Member of IEEE and the International Telecommunications Academy of Russia (ITA). His contribution to Research, Standards bodies, many publications and Industry Fora work programs has been well received. He started his career at Siemens in R&D and held leadership roles in Telecom, including several Research Projects from 1974-2010. Beginning 2011 he joined Huawei Technologies GmbH, as Head of European Corporate Research, and subsequently Head of Solution in the Enterprise Division with responsibilities for Smart Utilities technologies. Currently he is an independent consultant and Senior Strategic Advisor, a position he has held since September 2013. His areas of expertise through working in international projects include 5G, M2M, Big Data, Mission critical Systems, Collaboration on Smart Cities, Multi-Utility Smart Grid Communications platforms and their respective Management platforms as well as Advanced (Smart) Metering Infrastructure and value chains. Furthermore, he works on Internet of Things (IoT) and Future Internet Platforms which include integration of, Software Defined Networks (SDN), Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), Cloud and Information Centric Networking.

 

Editor:

Eileen Healy is a proven change agent who knows how to deliver solutions by crafting vision and executing strategy leading concrete results. She has been a member of the IEEE since 1982 and worked in the telecommunications industry for even longer. Eileen started as a network analyst helping an international financial brokerage minimize their costs for international telex^[1] and voice calls. Driven by her love for this work, she went on to study electrical engineering at UC Berkeley where her passion for communications landed her an unprecedented role as the only undergraduate working as a teaching assistant in Dr. John Whinnery’s optics and microwave lab while earning her BSEE. She then worked for Pacific Bell where she was the liaison to Stanford University’s Telecommunications Institute providing industry perspective and guest lecturing on development in commercial optical networks. As Vice-Chairman of ANSI’s subcommittee on Digital Hierarchies, she helped shape the SONET and SDH optical standards. Later, she helped to launch Pacific Bell Mobile Services where she and her colleagues bucked the trend in the U.S. and supported the emerging GSM standards leading to the widespread deployment in the U.S. She founded two companies that successfully supported the growth of mobile networks and services. She is an accomplished senior executive who consistently delivers results by remaining on the cutting-edge of changing market place dynamics. She has worked in the Metro-Ethernet Forum, the Cloud Services Forum and participated in the NFV Forum before its integration into ETSI. She is currently actively involved in the IEEE SDN Initiative holding various roles including the Editor-in-Chief of the SDN Newsletter.

 

[1] The original texting service that was used heavily in international stock and commodities trading until the 1990s.

 

CORD: Central Office Re-Architected as a Datacenter

Larry Peterson, Open Networking Lab

 

Landscape

Network operators are in the throes of unprecedented challenges. The proliferation of video traffic, mobile devices, and OTT services has pushed operator networks into uncharted territory. According to Krish Prabhu, CTO of AT&T Labs, for example, data traffic has increased 100,000 percent in the last eight years, and looking forward, plans are now underway to roll out ultra-fast fiber and access to 100 cities across the US.

Network operators want to make their networks efficient, programmable, elastic and agile to meet the challenges of user bandwidth demands, as well as to create new revenue streams with innovative services. They want to benefit from both the economies of scale (infrastructure constructed from a few commodity building blocks) and the agility (the ability to rapidly deploy and elastically scale services) that cloud providers enjoy today.

These cloud-inspired benefits are especially needed at the edge of operator network: in the Telco Central Office (CO). These facilities contain a diverse collection of purpose-built devices, assembled over 50 years, (standards-based architecture with vendor proprietary). This makes them both a source of significant CAPEX and OPEX and a potential barrier to rapid innovation. Moreover, large service providers operate thousands of such COs, each serving tens of thousands of residential, mobile, and enterprise customers.

In response to these challenges, network operators are re-inventing their networks to better leverage best practices in cloud elasticity and agility, Software Defined Networking (SDN), and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). This paper introduces one such effort—CORD—a collaborative effort between AT&T and the Open Networking Lab.

Introducing CORD

CORD re-architects the Central Office as a datacenter. The basic approach centers on unifying the following three related but distinct threads:

• The first is SDN, which is about separating the network’s control and data planes. This makes the control plane open and programmable, and that can lead to increased innovation. It also allows for simplification of forwarding devices that can be built using merchant silicon, resulting in less expensive white-box switches.
• The second is NFV, which is about moving the data plane from hardware appliances to virtual machines. This reduces CAPEX costs (through server consolidation and replacing high-margin devices with commodity hardware) and OPEX costs (through software-based orchestration). It also has the potential to improve operator agility and increases the opportunity for innovation.
• The third is the Cloud, which defines the state-of-the-art in building scalable services—leveraging software-based solutions, micro-service architecture, virtualized commodity platforms, elastic scaling, and service composition, to enable network operators to rapidly innovate.

The goal of CORD is not only to replace today’s purpose-built hardware devices with their more agile software-based counterparts, but also to make the CO an integral part of every Telco’s larger cloud strategy and to enable them to support more attractive and meaningful networking services.

Commodity Hardware

The target hardware for CORD consists of a collection of commodity servers and storage, interconnected by a leaf-spine fabric constructed from white-box switches. An illustrative example is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Target hardware, constructed from commodity servers, storage, and switches.

Although similar in design (albeit on a smaller scale) to a conventional datacenter, there are two unique aspects to this hardware configuration:

• The switching fabric—organized as a leaf-spine topology—is optimized for traffic flowing east-to-west, between the access network that connects customers to the CO and the upstream links that connects the CO to the operator’s backbone. There is no north-south traffic in the conventional sense.
• The racks of GPON OLT MACS commoditize connectivity to the access network. They replace proprietary and closed hardware that connects millions of subscribers to the Internet with an open, software-defined solution. (GPON is the example access technology in the reference implementation of CORD, but the same argument applies to other access technologies as well.)

Software Building Blocks

With respect to software, our reference implementation of CORD exploits three open source projects:

• OpenStack is the cluster management platform. It provides the core IaaS capability, and is responsible for creating and provisioning virtual machines (VMs) and virtual networks (VNs).
• ONOS is the network operating system that manages the underlying white-box switching fabric. It also hosts a collection of control applications that implement services on behalf of Telco subscribers. ONOS is also responsible for embedding virtual networks in the underlying fabric, which is in turn accessed via OpenStack’s Neutron API.
• XOS is a service abstraction layer that unifies infrastructure services (provided by OpenStack), control plane services (provided by ONOS. It provides explicit support for multi-tenant services, making it possible to create, name, operationalize, manage and compose services as first-class operations.

Virtualizing Legacy Devices

The first step is to virtualize the existing hardware devices, transforming each device into its software service counterpart and running it on commodity hardware. In the process, functionality is likely disaggregated and re-packaged in new ways. Figure 2 shows the devices that CORD virtualizes. They include Optical Line Termination (OLT), Customer Premises Equipment (CPE), and Broadband Network Gateways (BNG).

Figure 2. Legacy CO, including three physical devices to be virtualized.

Due to space limitations, this overview focuses on GPON technology and virtualizing the OLT to produce vOLT; there are also virtualized counterparts to the CPE (vCPE) and BNG (vBNG).

The first challenge is to create a commodity I/O Blade. AT&T has developed an open specification for a GPON MAC 1RU “pizza box,” as shown in Figure 3. This board includes the essential GPON Media Access Control (MAC) chip under control of a remote control program via OpenFlow. This replaces an existing closed and proprietary OLT chassis (not shown) that integrates this GPON MAC chip with GPON protocol management, 802.1ad-compliant VLAN bridge, and Ethernet MAC functions.

Figure 3. GPON OLT IO Blade.

The end result is to bring the access network interface under the same SDN-based control paradigm as the white-box based switching fabric. In other words, virtual OLT (vOLT), is implemented as a combination of: (1) Merchant Silicon (i.e., commodity GPON interface boards) and (2) an SDN control function that sets up and manages control plane functions of an OLT (e.g., 802.1X, IGMP Snooping, and OAM).

The vOLT control application running on top of ONOS facilitates attachment and authentication (AAA), establishes and manages VLANs connecting consumer devices (see next section) and the CO switching fabric on a per-subscriber basis, and manages other control plane functions of the OLT.

Service Orchestration

Replacing hardware devices with software running in virtual machines is a necessary first step, but is not by itself sufficient. Just as all the devices in a hardware-based CO must be wired together in a meaningful way, their software counterparts must also be managed as a collective. This process is often called service orchestration, but if network operators are to enjoy the same agility as cloud providers, the abstractions that underlie the orchestration framework must fully embrace (1) the elastic scale-out of the resulting virtualized functionality, and (2) the composition of the resulting disaggregated (unbundled) functionality. A model that simply “chains” VMs together as though it is operating on their hardware-based counterparts will not achieve either goal.

Our approach is to adopt Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) as a unifying principle. This brings the disparate functionality introduced by virtualizing the hardware devices under a single coherent model. The control functions run as scalable services (these functions run on top of ONOS), the data plane functions run as scalable services (these functions scale across a set of VMs), the commodity infrastructure is itself managed as a service (commonly known by the generic name IaaS), and various other global cloud services running in the CO are also managed as scalable services. No matter the role it plays in the overall CORD architecture, each service is structured in exactly the same way: it supports a logically centralized interface, called a service controller; it is elastically scale across a set of service instances (corresponding to VMs and OpenFlow switches); and it is multi-tenant with an associated tenant abstraction.

While vOLT, vCPE, and vBNG refer to the virtualized counterpart of the three physical devices, they are not complete and “pluggable” elements in CORD until they are packaged as services—each includes a multi-tenant service controller, and each scales independently across a set of service instances. Because, the new architecture no longer requires functionality to be bundled along the same boundaries as before, it is more intuitive to think of the virtualization process as resulting in three generic, multi-tenant services:

• Access-as-a-Service (ACCaaS): Implemented by a vOLT control application running on ONOS, where each tenant corresponds to a Subscriber VLAN.
• Subscriber-as-a-Service (SUBaaS): Implemented by a vCPE data plane function scaled across a set of containers, where each tenant corresponds to a Subscriber Bundle.
• Internet-as-a-Service (INTaaS): Implemented by a vBNG control application running on ONOS, where each tenant corresponds to a Routable Subnet.

If a Content Distribution Network (CDN)—itself a scalable cloud service deployed throughout the operator’s network, including caches in the CO—is added to these three new services, we have an example of the three kinds of services outlined in the Introduction: a cloud service (CDN), a data plane service (Subscriber-as-a-Service), and two control plane services (Access-as-a-Service, Internet-as-a-Service). This results in the legacy CO depicted in Figure 2 being re-architected into the datacenter version shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4. Four scalable services running in a CO, with a bare-metal switch located on the customer premises.

Path to Real-World Deployment

CORD is a significant milestone in bringing cost effectiveness and agility to Telco Central Offices. The plan is to build a fully functional reference implementation, followed by validating the architecture through lab trials and eventually field trials, and hardening the system along the way based on trial data. Taken as a whole, the goal is to bring CORD close to readiness for commercial deployments in operator networks.

 

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Larry Peterson is Chief Architect at the Open Networking Laboratory, Director of the PlanetLab Consortium, and the Robert E. Kahn Emeritus Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. He currently splits his time between Silicon Valley, Princeton, and Tucson, where he has an appointment at the University of Arizona. Peterson is also co-author of the best selling networking textbook Computer Networks: A Systems Approach. In 2007 he co-founded CoBlitz LLC to CDN technology developed on PlanetLab. CoBlitz was acquired by Verivue in 2010, and subsequently by Akamai in 2012. Peterson is a former Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, and served as program chair for SOSP, NSDI, and HotNets. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE, and a past recipient of the IEEE Kobayashi Award and the ACM SIGCOMM Award. He received his Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1985.

 

Editor:

Jose M. Verger is a networking industry veteran who has worked in new product development, engineering and product management for Cisco Systems, 3COM, Bell Communications Research (Bellcore), AT&T and multiple successful start-ups such as Sentient Networks, Point Red and Wavezero. Currently Jose is at Verizon focusing on mobile public networks architecture and planning for enterprise services including the virtualization efforts.

 

Softwarization is Coming of Age!

By Eileen Healy, Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Softwarization eNewsletter

Welcome to the inaugural edition of the IEEE SDN Newsletter. After one year of focused support and cross-fertilization efforts over many IEEE Societies, a growing, global IEEE Software Defined Network (SDN) technical community is emerging with shared interests in the opportunity and potential of SDN. Ultra-broadband diffusion, increasing processing speeds, IT costs reductions, the widespread deployment of data centers and virtualized services have enabled both established and new companies to grow without high capital costs or time to market constraints. These developments have paved the way for public network operators to leverage open software and commodity hardware to realize similar impacts on their business models.

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Paving the Way Toward Software-Defined Infrastructures

By Antonio Manzalini, Chair, IEEE SDN Initiative

SDN and NFV are facets of an overall systemic transformation called "softwarization" which is steering the evolution not only of Networks, but also Service Platforms (e.g., Cloud and Edge Computing architectures) and future terminals, machines and smart things.

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CORD: Central Office Re-Architected as a Datacenter

By Larry Peterson, Open Networking Lab

Network operators are in the throes of unprecedented challenges. The proliferation of video traffic, mobile devices, and OTT services has pushed operator networks into uncharted territory. According to Krish Prabhu, CTO of AT&T Labs, for example, data traffic has increased 100,000 percent in the last eight years, and looking forward, plans are now underway to roll out ultra-fast fiber and access to 100 cities across the US.

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Transform to a Network of the Future at Your Pace

By Bosco Eduardo Fernandes, Independent consultant and Senior Strategic Advisor

What started in the '90s as the first multimode, multiband architectural Standard emerges for Radio access systems has since become an inevitable evolutionary base for today's rigid Network infrastructure as traffic growth increases the costs and complexity of network operations. The underlying technologies can be leveraged to create a programmable, highly automated infrastructure. Virtual and physical assets are holistically managed and orchestrated as a single entity, creating simplicity out of potential chaos, with all resources available for maximum utilization and serving customer needs on demand. One of these next generation technologies is Software-Defined Network (SDN), which has complementary Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and cloud technologies that will increasingly be adopted by operators to help make networks more flexible and responsive to changes as required. They will be an integral part of the development of the IoT and in managing network resources to cope with the Big Data traffic generated.