The Future of SDN and Network Virtualization

“Operators are beginning to see the huge potential for SDN beyond the Data Center,” said Sue Rudd, director of service provider analysis for Strategy Analytics, in a January press release. “SDNs will extend across technologies, frequencies and protocols to deliver network services everywhere from anywhere. The immediate opportunity is IP routing for virtualized caching and storage, followed by shared processing for the Radio Access Network (RAN) and load sharing for mobile backhaul, leading eventually to a virtualized network core.”

But out of the more than 600 mobile operators in the world, only a handful are actually pushing SDN beyond the data center and into the network, according to Neil Coleman, director of global marketing for Actix, a company recently acquired by Amdocs that’s working to virtualize RANs with technology it calls “autonomics.”

Telefónica is looking to push SDN even further through its agreement with Japan’s NEC to virtualize the evolved packet core (EPC), the primary component of the LTE architecture.

Deutsche Telekom’s TeraStream is also advancing virtualized carrier networking. The idea is to leverage the benefits of IP network innovation, NFV and SDN in concert through TeraStream’s cloud-enabled, native IP architecture. The pilot project was officially launched last December, and its goal is pretty simple: as Axel Clauberg, DT’s vice president of aggregation, transport, IP, and fixed-access architecture, explained, “The reason for us doing SDN is that we can program services instead of re-architecting the network and the OSS for every new service.”

Clauberg added that NFV, SDN and IP network advancement all offer distinct benefits.

SDN:

• faster time to market (TTM);
• central control;
• service and network abstraction.

NFV:

• faster TTM;
• elasticity;
• redundancy;
• independence from hardware.

IP network advancement:

• drastic simplification;
• native IPv6;
• IPv4 as a service;
• IP and optical integration.

Together, these three technologies create a sweet spot that makes for one lean, mean communications services-generating machine. And although SDN doesn’t necessarily need to impact the OSS/BSS layer, Amartus, a provider of software-defined services (SDS), is working on solutions that marry service technologies and OSS.

Coordinating the delivery of SDS allows carriers to automate all phases of the delivery life cycle, from design through provisioning and operation, and leverages SDN and NFV technologies in the service-delivery process.

“Carriers have focused on building out connectivity, without the requisite investment in truly building out a service layer,” said Nancee Ruzicka, president of ICT Intuition, in an August press release announcing Amartus’s latest solution, Chameleon SDS. 

Active Broadband Networks, on the other hand, has turned its attention to automation at the broadband edge.

“There is a lot of talk about SDN in the data center and the cloud, but we feel the broadband edge has been overlooked,” says Stephen Collins. “Then operators can have more of a number of complex functions taken out of equipment and put into software, running on a commodity platform all programmers know how to use.”

This, he adds, offers a far more robust development environment and helps operators achieve the speed they need.