Can open-source projects (re-) shape the SDN/NFV-driven telecommunication market?

Telecom network operators face rapidly changing business needs. Due to their dependence on long product cycles they lack the ability to quickly respond to changing user demands. To spur innovation and stay competitive, network operators are investigating technological solutions with a proven track record in other application domains such as open source software projects. Open source software enables parties to learn, use, or contribute to technology from which they were previously excluded. OSS has reshaped many application areas including the landscape of operating systems and consumer software. The paradigmshift in telecommunication systems towards Software-Defined Networking introduces possibilities to benefit from open source projects. Implementing the control part of networks in software enables speedier adaption and innovation, and less dependencies on legacy protocols or algorithms hard-coded in the control part of network devices. The recently proposed concept of Network Function Virtualization pushes the softwarization of telecommunication functionalities even further down to the data plane. Within the NFV paradigm, functionality which was previously reserved for dedicated hardware implementations can now be implemented in software and deployed on generic Commercial Off-The Shelf (COTS) hardware. This paper provides an overview of existing open source initiatives for SDN/NFV-based network architectures, involving infrastructure to orchestration-related functionality. It situates them in a business process context and identifies the pros and cons for the market in general, as well as for individual actors

Insights in costing of continuous broadband internet on trains to allow delivering value via services

Continuous broadband Internet on trains is at the moment being deployed worldwide but not always profitable. Solely providing internet for travellers will have a negative return on investment. But, different service providers could be interested to share the unused capacity of resources deployed to offer other services. In this way, resources and their costs are shared over several services and revenues may rise above the total cost. Service operators should therefore be able to make well informed decisions based on an ex-ante estimate of the cost of a service. Using activity based costing (ABC), we investigate on the one hand how to determine the total cost of resources supplied and on the other how to estimate the cost of consumed resources of a service. Our results show that ABC can adequately cope with the case specific nature of the rollout of services on a train. ABC provides insights in the contributors to the cost per service and the unused capacity. Moreover, obtained results can be used to distribute the cost based on the usage of resources, activities and services, evaluate the service mix and identify candidates for outsourcing. Still, ABC does not give insight in how the unused capacity of a resource should be allocated. The optimal allocation of unused capacity will therefore remain the focus of future work

Insights in the cost of continuous broadband Internet on trains for multi-service deployments by multiple actors with resource sharing

The economic viability of broadband Internet services on trains has always been proved difficult, mainly due to a high investment cost and low willingness to pay by train passengers, but also due to unused opportunities such as non-passenger services (e.g. train performance monitoring, crew services) and optimization of the resources consumed to offer Internet services. Evaluating opportunities to improve the return on investment is therefore essential towards profitability of the business case. By efficiently sharing resources amongst services, costs can be pooled over several services in order to reduce the investment cost per service. Current techno-economic evaluation models are hard to apply to cost allocation in a multi-service deployment with multiple actors and resource sharing. We therefore propose a new evaluation model and apply it to a deployment of Internet services on trains. We start with a detailed analysis of the technical architecture required to provide Internet access on trains. For each component, we investigate the impact by the different services on resource consumption. The proposed techno-economic evaluation model is then applied in order to calculate the total cost and allocate the used and unused resources to the appropriate services. In a final step, we calculate the business case for each stakeholder involved in the offering of these services. This paper details the proposed model and reports on our findings for a multi-service deployment by multiple actors. Results show important benefits for the case that considers the application of resource sharing in a multi-service, multi-actor scenario and the proposed model produces insights in the contributors to the cost per service and the unused amount of a resource. In addition, ex-ante insights in the cost flows per involved actor are obtained and the model can easily be extended to include revenue flows to evaluate the profitability per actor. As a consequence, the proposed model should be considered to support and stimulate upcoming multi-actor investment decisions for Internet-based multi-service offerings on-board trains with resource sharing

Towards faster techno-economic evaluation of network scenarios via a modular network equipment database

Techno-economic analysis is used to evaluate technological solutions in different business environments via a simulation based approach. Four steps can be observed in techno-economic analysis: scope definition, modeling of costs and revenues, evaluation of the different solutions and refinement of the analysis. During the scoping step, the boundaries of the analysis are determined, the problem is divided into sub problems and a list of input values is collected. The collection of complete and precise inputs is of the greatest importance as faulty data leads to unreliable results (garbage in garbage out). Today, due to the lack of a structured way of sharing input values, inputs need to be collected on a case-by-case basis. Although a valid approach, it remains a time intensive process prone to errors. This paper therefore proposes a modular network equipment database containing a set of generic equipment such as an IP/MPLS router, a DWDM node, a fiber link and a twisted pair cable. Each of these is represented as a modular block model and described by a set of attributes and a set of drivers which are used to chain one network equipment's block model to one or more others. A complex network can as such be modeled as a chain of equipment block models which are determined by a set of drivers. As a consequence, the collection of inputs can be fast tracked, the problem of missing inputs can be partially resolved and cross-case comparison becomes possible. To make things more concrete, we illustrate this approach via the evaluation of a network scenario in which a network service provider expands its network with an extra core location

Deploying SDN and NFV at the speed of innovation: toward a new bond between standards development organizations, industry fora and open-source software projects

Standards development organizations (SDOs) exist to assure the development of consensus-based, quality standards. These formal standards are needed in the telecommunications market to achieve functional interoperability. The standardization process takes years, and then a vendor still needs to implement the resulting standard in a product. This prevents service providers (SPs) who are willing to venture into new domains from doing so at a fast pace. With the development of software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV), opensource technology is emerging as a new option in the telecommunications market. In contrast to SDOs, open-source software (OSS) communities create a product that may implicitly define a de-facto standard based on market consensus. Therefore, SPs are drawn to OSS, but they face technical, procedural, legal, and cultural challenges due to their lack of experience with open software development. The question therefore arises, how the interaction between OSS communities, SDOs, and industry fora (IF) can be organized to tackle these challenges. This article examines the evolving roles of OSS communities, IF, and SDOs, and places them in an NFV/SDN context. It sketches the differences between these roles and provides guidelines on how the interaction between them can turn into a mutually beneficial relationship that balances the conflicting goals of timely development on the one hand and technical excellence, openness, and fairness on the other, to reach their common goal of creating flexible and efficient telecommunications networks