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White Paper
Converged Transport Architecture: Improving Scale
and Efficiency in Service Provider Backbone
Networks
and Efficiency in Service Provider Backbone
Networks
What You Will Learn
Massive growth in backbone network traffic and increasingly volatile traffic patterns are causing significant
economic challenges for service providers.
Current architectural approaches rely on network layers that are built and operated independently. This model
contributes to scaling, provisioning, and operational inefficiencies that will soon push service providers past the
point where revenue can keep pace with needed investments.
Technology advances within a single network layer, although crucial, will not eliminate these inefficiencies. An
innovative new approach is needed that softens and optimizes inter-layer boundaries to create a highly converged
transport architecture.
This converged transport architecture must tightly integrate packet, optical time-division multiplexing (TDM), and
dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) layers across hardware, control planes, management planes, and
administrative domains to create a network that is much more efficient, less complex, and easier to scale and
operate.
Overview
In backbone networks, Internet traffic is growing at a rate that challenges business models based on existing
network architectures.
Both a service provider’s business model and network architecture must adapt to the
increasing and unpredictable demand for bandwidth, which arises from the proliferation of devices, increase in
subscribers, demand for video and multimedia, and new technologies such as cloud services. In addition, there is
rapid growth in non-Internet services, such as mobile backhaul, wholesale and transit, wavelength switching, and
private-line business services, which remain very popular with businesses. All these services share the same
underlying optical transport infrastructure with the foundation for Internet and IP services. Thus they rely on the
backbone network’s available capacity to operate. To keep up with increasing demand, service providers have little
backbone network’s available capacity to operate. To keep up with increasing demand, service providers have little
choice but to continue adding backbone capacity to support this growth and to create a reserve that can absorb the
spikes in traffic that will inevitably occur.