Control Plane - Deployment Challenges
To stay competitive, carriers must expeditiously deploy new services: video, traffic into multicast, unicast traffic, and peer-to-peer traffic. These services have different traffic engineering, quality, and security requirements, as well as different growth rates, business plans, and partners. A quick deployment strategy can result in too many services running over their infrastructures, thereby making it difficult to manage them and to control their costs. Addressing this challenge requires a control system that is scalable and provides increased system control and service enablement while operating efficiently and economically.
Service providers are feeling competitive pressure primarily due to service convergence. This convergence creates challenges: How to monetize the physical connections and how to leverage long-standing relationships that SPs have with their customers. They are evaluating their business models and looking at ways to deliver cost ef-fectively new experienced-based services that customers are demanding. As a result, SPs see a need for increased performance demands on the network infrastructure primarily due to richer service offerings such as video, traffic into multicast, unicast traffic, tier-to-tier traffic, and Web 2.0 traffic. The most straightforward way to achieve this — and to avoid larger capital expenses — is with multiple control planes. This demand should not be accompanied with an unnecessary quantity of extra network elements.
The acceptance of carrier Ethernet, combined with a worldwide push to build out next-generation networks to deploy voice, video, and data, has firmly placed the focus on the network’s edge. Next-generation services require scalability and high levels of interworking. These services are not a one-size-fits-all model; there are various Level 2 and Level 3 implementation approaches in play.
The requirements for an underlying, high-performance network demand greater operational efficiency from the network infrastructure: independent service scaling, flexible, and reduced risk service enablement.
Mitigating Risk Factors
Risk is defined by adding services in an existing network on existing routers. Every time carriers introduce
services on their existing network, they have to go through a series of compound scaling and regression testing to ensure that the new service will not adversely impact the existing service. Repeated additions require more and more testing. Equally as important, at the same time a carrier introduces more services into the network, the risk of affecting existing users increases greatly and could impact the quality of service they provide to the customers. Furthermore, service interruption becomes greater with the creation of added services. A control system that allows partitioning for a specific service always ensures that just one service is introduced.