Abstract
Abstract
The emergence and continuous evolution of OTT applications have drastically changed the telecommunication ecosystem. These applications push for more versatile communications with dynamic behaviors and more constraints on the network. However, traditional Telco architectures are ill-suited to meet the dynamic requirements of today's application services. Network services are monolithic and vertically integrated which makes management operations complex and results in static networks unable to respond as applications requirements rapidly change. Telcos need to transform their network architectures for such variations in customer demands. The objective is to achieve flexibility in offering services as service customization is increasingly presented as the desired property to be integrated in future network services, and dynamicity in building, deploying and delivering network services on-demand. For that, we rely on paradigms and technologies on service and network virtualization and softwarization to propose transformation guidelines. We present service and network architecture principles and models along with deployment and management models as required elements to achieve a flexible and dynamic Network-as-a-Service architecture for Telcos.
One General Introduction
One General Introduction
One point one Context and Motivations
In recent years, some important trends have been accelerated causing the telecommunication ecosystem to change drastically. Some of the most important changes are at the service level.
The main trend reshaping the service layer ecosystem is the development of an entirely new type of Service Providers, the "Over-The-Top" players. The rise of OTT players has driven an explosion of innovative applications that gain strong attraction by end users. These applications include Cloud and Content services for live and on-demand real-time video and communication applications. OTT applications became the new voice and messaging applications with hundreds of millions of users. In addition, the emergence of new smarter devices and faster access technologies like LTE and optic fiber is leading to a rapid rise of these services. A vast spectrum of services such as M2M, smart city, smart home and e-health services, are being developed tending to make digital and connected services for almost all aspects of the society only by using IP connectivity networks.
However, as these new actors do not own network infrastructures, the data traffic generated from the explosion of OTT applications is faster increasing and pushes network operators to put huge investments to scale the network capacities and support the traffic volumes. Indeed, OTTs set up on top of operator networks without any interaction of any kind with this latter and provide these application services only by exploiting the universal reachability of the Internet.
With this multiplication of services and devices in an "any-to-any" communications style, OTT applications will continue to impose a huge throughput demand, pushing networks to their limits and operators to continuously invest to manage, scale and maintain their networks. Moreover, these services engender completely new ways of using application services usually totally unpredictable by the network that network operators have to deal with. They also push for more bandwidth consumption and for increasing demands for better Quality of Service and Quality of Experience.