Optimizing Transport Efficiency with a Converged IP/Optical Backbone

YouTube recently announced that more than 48 hours worth of video are uploaded to its site every minute, a 37% increase over the per-minute traffic volume reported six months earlier and a 100% increase over per-minute traffic the year before.

The volume and pace of growth are sensational and underscore the pressure service providers are under as they strive to serve their customers today. Service providers need to continually scale bandwidth to meet increasing customer demand and generate new revenues while, at the same time, reducing the costs and complexity of transporting traffic across their infrastructure. The issues are especially serious for mobile service providers, which face the unwelcome expectation that the costs to serve escalating data usage will exceed service revenues within the next four years, according to Juniper Research.

A converged backbone that consolidates IP and optical infrastructure and functions can help companies prevent their costs from outpacing revenues while preparing the networks for continued growth and the increasing use of new high-bandwidth services.

"The market is constrained by the level of CapEx that providers are willing to pony up to the table," said Ron Kline, principal analyst in the network infrastructure practice at Ovum.  "You have to be able to do more with less. That's the beauty behind convergence. It simplifies processes and shares costs through different layers of the network."

A converged backbone, implemented as part of a High Leverage Network^TM, achieves these objectives because it tightly integrates activities performed at the data plane, control plane, and management plane, which creates significant improvements in overall performance and efficiencies.

"The purpose of this isn't just about spending money to save money," said Houman Modarres, director of product marketing within Alcatel-Lucent's IP division.

"The idea is to make the transport infrastructure as efficient and scalable as possible, lowering the overall cost per bit while keeping an eye toward future needs, so when new bandwidth-intensive applications and services emerge, the network infrastructure is ready for the challenge," he said.

Modarres said that Alcatel-Lucent's Converged Backbone Transformation (CBT) solution can exploit the company's internally developed 100G silicon innovations to ensure the fastest possible connection speeds for transport of current and future services. Higher-speed 100G links also drastically lower power consumption, which helps companies reduce energy costs and achieve their green objectives. 

While higher speed 100G links across the IP and optical backbone are critical for efficiently transporting the mounting volume of data traffic, the integration offered by the Alcatel-Lucent CBT solution extends the technology's benefits far beyond transport speed capabilities.  The control plane and management plane integration the solution facilitates is equally important because it provides cross-layer operational visibility. This allows service providers the flexibility to combine appropriate operational functions in the IP and optical arms of their businesses, which have historically operated separately. The integration eliminates complexities and reduces costs while improving visibility into and across both domains, Modarres said. 

Modarres noted that large and small service providers may have different timetables and economic factors influencing their individual transitions to a converged backbone and they will implement the technology at a pace that best suits their needs. The CBT solution can be deployed incrementally and with a variety of hybrid approaches that facilitate a service provider's need to transform their backbone infrastructure at their own pace and in step with their operational and organizational realities.

"Dozens of service providers are doing this now at different stages and in different ways," he said. 

Companies that have adopted or conducted trials of CBT components include 360networks, Verizon Communications and Qwest (CenturyLink) in the U.S.;  Germany's T-Systems; Australia's Nextgen Networks;  Thailand's True Corporation; and Portugal Telecom.

Nextgen Networks, for example, has demonstrated the CBT solution in a High Leverage Network^TM architecture to seamlessly integrate optical and IP technologies using 100G Ethernet and coherent optical links. 

"This is a key part of our ongoing program to create a converged optical/IP backbone that is more cost-effective to run and scale and ten times faster than the links that are commonly used today," said Phil Sykes, managing director of Nextgen Networks.