Enterprise network convergence: path to cost optimization

During the past two decades, telecommunications has evolved a great deal. In the eighties, people were using television, radio and telephone as their communication systems. Eventually, the introduction of the Internet and the WWW immensely transformed the telecommunications industry. This internet revolution brought about a huge change in the way businesses communicated and operated. Enterprise networks now had an increasing demand for more bandwidth as they started to embrace newer technologies. The requirements of the enterprise networks grew as the applications and services that were used in the network expanded. This stipulation for fast and high performance communication systems has now led to the emergence of converged network solutions. Enterprises across the globe are investigating new ways to implement voice, video, and data over a single network for various reasons – to optimize network costs, to restructure their communication system, to extend next generation networking abilities, or to bridge the gap between their corporate network and the existing technological progress. To date, organizations had multiple network services to support a range of communication needs. Investing in this type of multiple communication infrastructures limits the networks ability to provide resourceful bandwidth optimization services throughout the system. Thus, as the requirements for the corporate networks to handle dynamic traffic grow day by day, the need for a more effective and efficient network arises. A converged network is the solution for enterprises aspiring to employ advanced applications and innovative services. This thesis will emphasize the importance of converging network infrastructure and prove that it leads to cost savings. It discusses the characteristics, architecture, and relevant protocols of the voice, data and video traffic over both traditional infrastructure and converged architecture. While IP-based networks present excellent quality for non real-time data networking, the network by itself is not capable of providing reliable, quality and secure services for real-time traffic. In order for IP networks to perform reliable and timely transmission of real-time data, additional mechanisms to reduce delay, jitter and packet loss are required. Therefore, this thesis will also discuss the important mechanisms for running real-time traffic like voice and video over an IP network. Lastly, it will also provide an example of an enterprise network specifications (voice, video and data), and present an in depth cost analysis of a typical network vs. a converged network to prove that converged infrastructures provide significant savings

Comparative analysis of LTE backbone transport techniques for efficient broadband penetration in a heterogeneous network morphology

In the bid to bring about a solution to the nagging problem associated with the provision of ubiquitous broadband access, Next Generation Network (NGN) popularly referred to as Long Term Evolution (LTE) network with appropriate network integration technique is recommended as solution. Currently, Internet Protocol/Multi-Protocol Label Switching (IP/MPLS) is the transport technique in LTE backbone infrastructure. This technique, however, suffers significantly in the event of failure of IP path resulting in delay and packet loss budgets across the network.The resultant effect is degradation in users’ quality of service (QoS) experience with real-time services.  A competitive alternative is the Internet Protocol /Asynchronous Transfer Mode (IP/ATM). This transport technique provides great dynamism in the allocation of bandwidth and supports varying requests of multimedia connections with diverse QoS requirements. This paper, therefore, seeks to evaluate the performance of these two transport techniques in a bid to establish the extent to which the latter technique ameliorates the aforementioned challenges suffered by the previous technique. Results from the simulation show that the IP/ATM transport scheme is superior to the IP/MPLS scheme in terms of average bandwidth utilization, mean traffic drop and mean traffic delay in the ratio of 9.8, 8.7 and 1.0% respectively

IPTV deployment - Trigger for advanced network services!

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QoS Provisioning in Converged Satellite and Terrestrial Networks: A Survey of the State-of-the-Art

It has been widely acknowledged that future networks will need to provide significantly more capacity than current ones in order to deal with the increasing traffic demands of the users. Particularly in regions where optical fibers are unlikely to be deployed due to economical constraints, this is a major challenge. One option to address this issue is to complement existing narrow-band terrestrial networks with additional satellite connections. Satellites cover huge areas, and recent developments have considerably increased the available capacity while decreasing the cost. However, geostationary satellite links have significantly different link characteristics than most terrestrial links, mainly due to the higher signal propagation time, which often renders them not suitable for delay intolerant traffic. This paper surveys the current state-of-the-art of satellite and terrestrial network convergence. We mainly focus on scenarios in which satellite networks complement existing terrestrial infrastructures, i.e., parallel satellite and terrestrial links exist, in order to provide high bandwidth connections while ideally achieving a similar end user quality-of-experience as in high bandwidth terrestrial networks. Thus, we identify the technical challenges associated with the convergence of satellite and terrestrial networks and analyze the related work. Based on this, we identify four key functional building blocks, which are essential to distribute traffic optimally between the terrestrial and the satellite networks. These are the traffic requirement identification function, the link characteristics identification function, as well as the traffic engineering function and the execution function. Afterwards, we survey current network architectures with respect to these key functional building blocks and perform a gap analysis, which shows that all analyzed network architectures require adaptations to effectively support converged satellite and terrestrial networks. Hence, we conclude by formulating several open research questions with respect to satellite and terrestrial network convergence.This work was supported by the BATS Research Project through the European Union Seventh Framework Programme under Contract 317533

Evolution of Broadband Communication Networks: Architecture and Applications

With the rapid increase in users’ demand for flexibility and scalability of communication services, broadband communication networks are facing an ongoing challenge of providing various broadband services using a single communication architecture. This leads to the evolution of a challenging field of multiservice broadband network architectures. This chapter discusses the basic concepts associated with broadband communication network architectures with emphasis on provision of multiservice, and it also focuses on the evolution of broadband communication networks from the traditional architecture to the incorporation of virtualization services, that is, cloud computing. Another important aspect, which relates to the multiservice broadband network, is the “applications” which, as this chapter highlights, are a key-driving factor for the evolution of broadband communication networks. Moreover, this chapter also includes a discussion on New Zealand’s government initiatives to provide improved network coverage within the country

QoS SOLUTIONS FORVIDEOCONFERENCING

This project is intended to gain knowledge and apply the theory leamt about the need of QoS in videoconferencing and the various options available. Today's conferencing applications are now IP friendly, it can run on either dedicated lines (like ISDN or telephone lines) or IP networks. However, as most network administrators know, conferencingapplications can wreak havoc on unprepared corporate networks. The key to successfully deploying conferencing applications is the activation of Quality of Service (QoS). QoS refers to a network's ability to reliably and consistently provide a certain level of throughput and performance. QoS for conferencing typically involves network availability, bandwidth, end-to-end delay, jitter, and packet loss. Simply stated, if the network doesn't conform to the minimum requirements in any of these areas, the conferences are doomed to fail. QoS can be achieved in a variety of ways, including over-provisioning (deploying additional bandwidth), data prioritization, and the use of QoS-enabled overlay or converged networks. Organizations have two main options for deploying QoS within their organizations; convergence or overlay. Convergence requires the use of QoS-capable WAN links throughout the organization. In many cases, this requires a fork-lift upgrade and migration of all network resources, which can place convergence out of reach of many cost-sensitive organizations. On the other hand, overlay networks allow a step-by-step migration from a non-QoS to a QoS network without the high cost and inherent risk of major network reconfigurations. In this way, overlay networks are a first step toward convergenc

Internet Protocol/MultiProtocol Label Switching (IP/MPLS) Networks

This paper discusses different aspects of Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) networks. In this paper, we first discussed MPLS in detail, the technology was developed to advance the IP network

A Survey on the Contributions of Software-Defined Networking to Traffic Engineering

Since the appearance of OpenFlow back in 2008, software-defined networking (SDN) has gained momentum. Although there are some discrepancies between the standards developing organizations working with SDN about what SDN is and how it is defined, they all outline traffic engineering (TE) as a key application. One of the most common objectives of TE is the congestion minimization, where techniques such as traffic splitting among multiple paths or advanced reservation systems are used. In such a scenario, this manuscript surveys the role of a comprehensive list of SDN protocols in TE solutions, in order to assess how these protocols can benefit TE. The SDN protocols have been categorized using the SDN architecture proposed by the open networking foundation, which differentiates among data-controller plane interfaces, application-controller plane interfaces, and management interfaces, in order to state how the interface type in which they operate influences TE. In addition, the impact of the SDN protocols on TE has been evaluated by comparing them with the path computation element (PCE)-based architecture. The PCE-based architecture has been selected to measure the impact of SDN on TE because it is the most novel TE architecture until the date, and because it already defines a set of metrics to measure the performance of TE solutions. We conclude that using the three types of interfaces simultaneously will result in more powerful and enhanced TE solutions, since they benefit TE in complementary ways.European Commission through the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (GN4) under Grant 691567 Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the Secure Deployment of Services Over SDN and NFV-based Networks Project S&NSEC under Grant TEC2013-47960-C4-3-