CSPs are faced with many challenges to remain competitive in the marketplace and must work to ensure service visibility, optimize current network resources, and reduce their energy consumption and carbon footprints.
also include:
Improved scalability: SRv6 allows for efficient scaling of networks, making them more resilient to traffic surges.
Reduced latency: SRv6 reduces latency by making it easier to deploy services to the network edge and thus closer to users, as well as to route traffic network-wide more
efficiently.
Reduced costs: SRv6 reduces costs by making it possible to safely increase network resource utilization rates and reducing the need to overprovision for geographic or for
redundancy purposes.
Increased flexibility: SRv6 allows network operators to quickly and easily reconfigure networks in response to changing business needs.
To efficiently deliver services, networks must understand what applications are doing and their needs as these are involved in real-time. Similarly, applications need to know the state of the
network in order to most effectively and economically deliver value to end users.
One of the key ways SRv6 makes this possible is by enabling service visibility across the entire network. The service control plane can interact with the network and services to optimize the
overall efficiency of both, and deliver organizational objectives such as enforcing service level agreements (SLAs), UE requirements, organization policies, cost optimization, disaggregation, and
moving services to the network edge.
Another major benefit is the ability to transparently move services from private network functions (PNFs), to VNFs and cloud-native network functions (CNFs), and to support the transition to
SR-aware applications while still supporting SR-unaware services.
A final key benefit is to support the move to green computing and sustainable information and communications technology (ICT). To remain competitive, CSPs must find ways to reduce their energy
consumption and carbon footprints while still delivering the best services and solutions to their customers.
Overall, CSPs are faced with many challenges to remain competitive in the marketplace and must work to ensure service visibility, optimize current network resources, and reduce their energy
consumption and carbon footprints. With the right strategies and solutions, CSPs can be well-positioned to succeed in the face of these challenges.
Meeting the challenges and delivering services at the network edge
Taking a modular, open approach to building a MEC solution specifically architected for delivering services at the network edge is not only possible but with current technology and commercially
available hardware and software it can be deployed now. And when combined with SRv6 support, it becomes the vehicle to spread the agility and performance advantages of the network edge
network-wide, delivering accelerated service insertion, more flexible service composition, elastic scaling of services to multiple terabits, savings in operating costs, better security, and
faster problem resolution.
