Energy-Efficient Transport for the Future Internet

The emergence of new interactive and peer-to-peer broadband services is fostering the growth of subscriber access bandwidth as well as broadband penetration, resulting in a continuous increase in traffic in metro and core networks by a factor of 10 every five years. State-of-the-art Internet Protocol (IP) based core network architectures are expected to suffer from severe scalability problems with respect to complexity, power, and cost. Novel architectural approaches will be required as a basis for the future converged packet transport infrastructure offering peta bit networking capabilities at much lower power and cost. We describe a scalable, future-proof architecture which reduces complexity as far as possible by shifting packet processing to the edges of the network, aggregating traffic into large containers, and applying simple circuit switching whenever possible, preferably in the photonic layer. Novel approaches for optimized traffic management contribute to the simplification of processing, protocols, network control, and management. The expected savings, together with service-driven quality of service (QoS) provisioning, can open new ways for implementing high leverage transport networks and deriving new revenues. (C) 2010 Alcatel-Lucent.