By Nagesh Nandiraju , Ph.D. and Sebnem Ozer, Ph.D., ARRIS Inc.
Today, a growing number of enterprises and SMBs are adopting cloud infrastructure for data storage, computation and services, which is driving increased traffic in unpredictable patterns. Enterprises are seeking greater flexibility from the access network infrastructure to effectively address demands, such as dynamic bandwidth and ad hoc services, from these new cloud services.
To successfully compete and lead in this market, MSOs need to evolve their current infrastructure into a more agile network that is capable of launching new services with much shorter lead times. An overarching common control and management layer is required to address the needs in a timely and cost effective way.
Software defined networking (SDN) presents an interesting concept of decoupling the control and data planes. As traditional, and even more modern, network architectures struggle to cope with dynamic applications and services, applying SDN paradigms will lend towards an effective solution to solve the operators’ challenges. This paper highlights how SDN principles can be operationalized to result in a network infrastructure platform that is easy to manage and also presents new opportunities to monetize from the network