by Julius Francis, Sr. Director, Product Marketing, Juniper Networks
As new advancements are made in 5G, Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing, doors are opening for network operators to play a more prominent role in the delivery of next generation consumer and enterprise services. However, these opportunities come paired with new challenges. Specifically, these new services and requirements drive increased traffic and diverse traffic patterns throughout networks, demands that will have the most significant impact on metro networks.
Metro networks will play an increasingly critical role in service delivery innovations; where all services accessing the network converge (e.g., mobile devices, laptops, gaming consoles, IoT devices and sensors, etc.). Traditionally, metro networks were built to funnel traffic into centralized edge and core resources – a characteristic that is rapidly evolving as edge service technologies are increasingly virtualized and instantiated across new cloud resources. The result is more efficient use of metro facilities as more and more workloads remain in the metro reducing latency and improving user experiences. As a result, metro traffic is projected to grow four times faster than anywhere else in the network by 2025.
To leverage this opportunity, network operators must rethink how metro networks are architected to unleash new digital experiences – from how they’re designed, to how they’re used, to how their resources are allocated. And operators must fully embrace automation to make this new level of orchestration possible. Focusing on this transformation will help operators deliver better user experiences, helping them play a more prominent and profitable role in the digital ecosystem.
Drivers of Change
Over the next five years network traffic growth will continue, driven largely by the increased adoption, virtualization and prominence of edge applications. Cloud computing resources are increasingly being deployed across cloud resources in parallel with the metro, moving the execution of edge services from regional data centers to the cloud – a trend that is expected to increase over the next decade. Many next-generation edge applications and services require low latency and customized SLAs, which legacy networks based on regional data centers may struggle to provide.
Further, the proliferation of high-quality and mobile video content will increase demands on metro networks. Video content will increasingly be cached within the metro and distributed to users locally rather than from central cache locations within the core.
As new distributed 5G and edge services push more workloads out to distributed cloud resources, existing metro networks built for conventional networking will no longer be sufficient to leverage the benefits associated with cloud-based edge computing. All of these issues are driving the need for change in network architecture, infrastructure and operation.
Reimaging Metro Network Design
Many legacy metro networks are designed using ring topologies, which enable metro networks to carry traffic from access nodes, across an aggregation network, to regional data centers. While there are many instances where the ring design can solely provide adequate performance, operators are turning to a new industry trend to achieve the flexibility and agility needed to handle increasing network traffic and fully leverage the advantages of edge computing – the ring topology paired with spine-leaf. In a spine-leaf topology, each network element has a dedicated connection point, which reduces the transit traffic and throughput requirements on each device. Therefore, this combination provides more scalable, flexible and resilient bandwidth and allows metro networks to handle higher rates of traffic and bandwidth needs while leveraging the power of two topologies.
By reimagining their metro network design, operators can future proof their organizations for the challenges of the 5G, IoT and cloud era. To attain a next-generation metro network, network operators must stay laser focused on achieving the following:
- New network architectures. To keep pace with shifts in metro network requirements and support the dramatic growth in traffic, metro topologies can leverage ring topologies, spine-leaf topologies, or a hybrid of both networking architectures.
- Scalability and flexibility. To achieve elastic scalability, new routers and network architectures with scalable bandwidth, real-time service monitoring and control, and end-to-end automation must be implemented.
- Service and application intelligence. Next-generation metro networks leverage network slicing to intelligently steer traffic to the right physical and virtualized resource by identifying the most efficient path across the network to optimize user experience. Future-proofed metro networks must have cloud computing levels of orchestration and automation to keep pace with evolving services, applications and user expectations.
- End-to-end automation. Network automation is necessary to reduce complexity and help engineers manage the increased traffic load and simplify operations. Manual operations are no longer capable of keeping pace with the dynamics of a next-generation metro network.
- Converged multiservice metro networks. To manage the increasing scope, scale and complexity onto one common network, next-generation metro networks will need to eliminate siloes from legacy networks to focus less on process and more on end-user outcomes.
Metro Networks for Next-Gen 5G, Edge and IoT Services
The 5G, IoT and cloud era brings incredible opportunity in every market vertical, but there will be growing pains along the way. The key to addressing new bandwidth, latency and orchestration challenges will be for operators to advance and modernize their network architecture. A metro network designed for yesterday’s static transport and aggregation needs simply won’t be capable of supporting the service delivery needs of 2021 and beyond.
By incorporating architectures built for automation and scale, metro networks that offer flexible network slicing, service-aware technologies and cloud-scale capabilities, will exceed user expectations for every service they deliver—while reducing the complexity of operations.
