With network operators
under increased pressure
to maximise efficiency
and scale up to meet
the ever-growing
bandwidth demands,
Virginie Hollebecque, Vice
President and Managing
Director for Western
Europe and Middle East
at Ciena, tells us how
the autonomous network
enables cost savings
and efficiencies.
ith the imminent arrival of
high-speed 5G networks,
the advent of the Internet
of Things, Artificial
Intelligence and Big Data analytics,
network operators in the Middle East are
under increased pressure to maximise
efficiency and scale up to meet the ever-
growing bandwidth demands.
W
The gathering momentum behind
Software Defined Networks (SDN),
Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) and
individual Virtual Network Functions (VNF)
is helping mobile network operators move
out of rigid proprietary environments. The
resulting automation of network-related
processes enables cost savings and
increases in efficiency.
The autonomous network is a trend that
has been building for some time. They
run with nominal human intervention
and can configure, monitor and maintain
themselves independently. This is ideal
from a cost saving perspective but is less
useful from an innovation standpoint.
To enable innovation, networks must also
be adaptive. An adaptive network enables
service providers to evolve their current
infrastructures into a communications
loop that relays information from network
elements, instrumentation, users and
applications to a software layer for review,
analysis and action – rather than bogging
down the network itself.
The adaptive network includes three
inter-related layers: programmable
infrastructure, analytics and intelligence,
and software control and automation.
Programmable infrastructure
The programmable infrastructure layer
features the network’s physical and
virtual elements, in addition to the
associated data. This layer can interpret
that data enabling the network to make
autonomous decisions – which could be
anything from routing traffic around a
malfunctioning circuit or investigating
and correcting an issue with latency
or lower-than-expected capacity on a
specific link.
This programmable infrastructure requires
a flexible grid; a reconfigurable photonic
layer to give the ability to reroute channels
of variable spectral occupancy across any
path and across any optical spectrum in
the network; and telemetry from the IP
layer correlated with routing data.
In addition, a programmable infrastructure
needs tunable coherent transponders to
efficiently map a flexible number of client
signals to the variable line capacity. In
turn, that requires a centralised purpose-
built Optical Transport Network (OTN) or
packet switching architecture.
Analytics and intelligence
As providers face an explosion of data
and demand across their networks,
the implications may seem complex.
But these challenges also have their
benefits, as they grant providers access
to a growing wealth of information that,
if harnessed effectively, can help them
make better decisions to optimise their
network performance and deliver a better
customer experience.
Having easy access to all the information
needed to accurately plan and optimise
network resources can help providers
meet both current and future demand,
enabling them to anticipate potential
network and service disruptions before
they even happen, and even allow them
to dynamically adjust network bandwidth
requirements based on their customers’
needs. These may seem like impossible
Unlocking intelligence
with the adaptive network
62
Issue 04
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