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The operation and management of software-based communication systems and services is a big challenge for infrastructure and service providers. The challenge is mainly associated with the more significant number of configurable elements and the higher dynamicity in the software-based systems than the classical ones. On the other hand, the modularity and programmability in software-based networks enabled by technologies like Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) provide new opportunities for operators to realize advanced network and service management strategies beyond the classical techniques. In our work, we elaborate on these new opportunities and propose a novel strategy for the management of survivable cloud services. In particular, we leverage the flexibility of SDN and NFV to combine proactive protection and reactive restoration mechanisms, and we put forward a novel strategy for enhancing the survivability of cloud services. Through comprehensive evaluations, we demonstrate that the proposed strategy offers significant benefits in terms of availability and restorability of services while reducing, at the same time, the overhead caused by the relocation of cloud services in case of failures.

Network slicing enables an infrastructure provider (InP) to support heterogeneous 5G services over a common platform (i.e., by creating a customized slice for each service). Once in operation, slices can be dynamically scaled up/down to match the variation of their service requirements. An InP generates revenue by accepting a slice request. If a slice cannot be scaled up when required, an InP has to also pay a penalty (proportional to the level of service degradation). It becomes then crucial for an InP to decide which slice requests should be accepted/rejected in order to increase its net profit. This paper presents a slice admission strategy based on reinforcement learning (RL) in the presence of services with different priorities. The use case considered is a 5G flexible radio access network (RAN), where slices of different mobile service providers are virtualized over the same RAN infrastructure. The proposed policy learns which are the services with the potential to bring high profit (i.e., high revenue with low degradation penalty), and hence should be accepted. The performance of the RL-based admission policy is compared against two deterministic heuristics. Results show that in the considered scenario, the proposed strategy outperforms the benchmark heuristics by at least 23%. Moreover, this paper shows how the policy is able to adapt to different conditions in terms of 1) slice degradation penalty versus slice revenue factors, and 2) proportion of high versus low priority services.

The fifth generation (5G) of mobile technology, 5G is anticipated to be a significant leap in the evolution of mobile communication. 5G will be designed to attain 1000 times higher data volumes, 10 times lower latency, and 100 times more connected devices than its predecessor, 4G. Due to 5Gs ability to sustain high bandwidth per unit area, 5G is considered to be a cost-efficient solution to provide fixed wireless access (FWA) to households on a large scale. FWA is seen as an attractive alternative for fixed broadband access in scenarios where last mile access based on wired technologies is not economically viable. While approaches for enhancing user experience in a 5G FWA environment are investigated in the research community, the problem of providing cost-effective high capacity transport for FWA deployments still remains a major challenge. This is particularly challenging due to diverse transport network architectures and requirements imposed by different 5G deployment models. This paper addresses this problem by formulating a generalized joint-optimization framework to simultaneously plan wireless access and optical transport for 5G FWA networks in order to minimize the deployment cost while meeting various network requirements. We demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework by applying it to a real scenario with a range of deployment options and where different types of optical x-haul solutions are considered. The results provide a cornerstone for deployment strategies that will be imperative for realizing a future-proof and cost-effective broadband access network.

This chapter introduces a techno‐economic framework that provides a complete market analysis of the various business actors for any type of mobile access network deployments. It presents a case study where the proposed business feasibility framework is applied. The chapter presents a comprehensive techno‐economic framework for estimating the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a backhaul network segment as well as for analyzing the business viability of a given wireless network deployment. It focuses on two backhaul technologies: microwave and fiber. The chapter addresses the framework proposed specifically only the backhaul segment, but it is general enough to also be applied to the other 5G transport solutions. It also presents the TCO module used in the proposed framework. The module covers both the Capital Expenditure and the Operational Expenditure aspects of the backhaul segment. The backhaul network is responsible for aggregating the users' traffic from the wireless access to the metro/backbone segment of the network.

Network slicing is a key concept in 5G networking. It enables an infrastructure provider (InP) to support heterogeneous services over a common platform by creating a customized slice for each one of them. Once in operation, the slices can be dynamically scaled up/down to match the variation of service requirements. Although an InP generates revenue by accepting a slice request, however it might need to pay a penalty (proportional to the level of service degradation) if a slice cannot be scaled up when required. Hence, it becomes crucial to decide which slice requests should be accepted in order to maximize the net profit of an InP. This paper presents a slice admission strategy based on big data analytics (BDA) predictions. The intuition is to accept a slice request only when it is estimated that no service degradation will take place for both the incoming slice request and the slices already in operation. In this way, the penalty paid by an InP is contained, with beneficial effects on the overall net profit. Apart from simulations, the performance of the proposed admission policy has also been evaluated using emulation. Simulation results show that, in the presence of a high penalty due to service degradation, using BDA predictions brings up to 50.7% increase in profit, as compared to a slice admission policy without BDA. Emulation results for a small network scenario show a profit increase of up to 38.3% with only a small impact on the slice provisioning time (i.e., due to the processing of BDA predictions).

We propose a novel algorithm to dimension the backup elements in an optical metro network, by considering the adoption of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and wireless interfaces to realize backup wireless links. Our key idea is to efficiently find the set of node pairs that have to be connected by means of multi-hop UAV-based wireless links, which are selected based on the simulation of multiple disaster events. Results, obtained over a set of meaningful scenarios, demonstrate that our solution can greatly reduce the total installation costs compared to a naive approach, which is instead solely tailored to the restoration of the disrupted links in a given disaster scenario.

The dynamic provisioning of Service Function Chain (SFC) using Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) is a challenging problem, especially for availability-constrained services. The provisioning of backup resources is often used to ensure that availability requirements are fulfilled. However, the assignment of backup resources should be carefully designed to avoid resource inefficiencies as much as possible.This paper proposes the Optional Backup with Shared Path and Shared Function (OBSPSF) strategy, which aims at improving resource efficiency while fulfilling the availability requirements of SFC requests. The strategy uses optional backup provisioning to ensure that backup resources are assigned only when strictly needed (i.e., when the SFC alone does not meet the availability constraint). Moreover, OBSPSF encourages backup sharing (among both connectivity and backup VNFs) to reduce the backup resource overhead. Results show that the strategy can accommodate orders-of-magnitude more services than benchmark heuristics from the literature.

We propose a cost-effective metro network architecture with fiber-granular routing and path-granular add/drop operations together with its ILP-based design algorithm. The proposal alleviates the impact of filtering impairment while using already deployed OXC/ROADM nodes. Numerical simulations on several real-world metro topologies verify that it increases the spectral efficiency compared to the ideal method for DWDM networks.

One key challenge in 5G networks is to guarantee the survivability of services in the event of failures. This paper focuses on the hybrid cloud radio access network (H-CRAN) architecture. The proposed strategy guarantees survivability in the presence of failures affecting nodes/links in the midhaul segment (i.e., connecting the radio aggregation unit (RAU) nodes to their respective radio cloud center (RCC) nodes) as well as compute resources (i.e., servers) in the RCC nodes. In the envisioned strategy each RAU node is connected to a primary and a backup RCC node (i.e., with backup compute resources) via two node disjoint connectivity paths in the midhaul. The proposed strategy, called Shared-Path Shared-Compute Planning (SPSCP), lowers the overall design cost by trying to share as much as possible backup connectivity and compute resources among RAU nodes. This is made possible by introducing a shareability metric early into the RCC node selection process so that the chance of sharing backup resources is maximized. Simulation results show that the SPSCP strategy can lead to up to 28% cost savings when compared to conventional resilient design strategies

QoS-based connectivity coordinated by the 5GEx Multi-domain Orchestrator exploiting novel stateful BRPC is demonstrated for the first time over a multi-operator multi-technology transport network within the European 5GEx Sandbox, including Segment Routing and optical domains.

Connection provisioning in Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) networks needs to account for a number of crucial parameters. On the one hand, operators need to ensure the connection availability requirements defined in Service Level Agreements (SLAs). This is addressed by selecting an appropriate amount of backup resources and recovery strategies for the connections over which services are provisioned. Services requiring less strict availability requirements can be routed over unprotected lightpaths. Services with more strict availability requirements are provisioned over protected lightpaths in order to cope with possible failures in the network. Another important aspect to consider during the provisioning process is energy efficiency. Green strategies leverage on setting network devices in Sleep Mode (SM) or Active Mode (AM) depending on whether or not they are needed to accommodate traffic. However, frequent power state changes introduce thermal fatigue which in turn has a negative effect on the device lifetime. Finally, in multi-period traffic scenarios, it is also important to minimize the number of reconfigurations of lightpaths already established in the network in order to avoid possible traffic disruptions at higher layers. The work presented in this paper tackles the connection provisioning paradigm in an optical backbone network with a multi-period traffic scenario. More specifically the paper looks into the interplay among (i) energy efficiency, (ii) thermal fatigue, and (iii) lightpath reconfiguration aspects. To this end, the Energy and Fatigue Aware Heuristic with Unnecessary Reconfiguration Avoidance (EFAH-URA) is introduced, showing that it is possible to balance the three aspects mentioned above in an efficient way. When compared to the pure energy-aware strategies, EFAH-URA significantly improves the average connection availability for both unprotected and protected connections. On the other hand, it is done at the expense of reduced energy saving.

Core network survivability affects the reliability performance of telecommunication networks and remains one of the most important network design considerations. This paper critically examines the ...

The IoT has been emerging as the next big leap in the information and communication technology sector. Providing a unified communication platform to support billions of smart connected devices seam ...

In this paper, we propose a new restoration algorithm for disaster recovery in Elastic Optical Networks (EONs). The algorithm considers the different requirements on restoration delay and bandwidth degradation while restoring over multiple routes. Furthermore, the algorithm is able to adapt the connection recover process to the post-disaster network conditions and, consequently, increase the number of restored connections. Results indicate that the proposed strategy is able to improve connections restorability and decrease bandwidth blocking probability when compared to restoration approach based on bandwidth degradation and multipath recovery.

The paper investigates the performance of a multi-domain orchestrator (MdO) deployed in a real multi-domain European testbed. Results show how the MdO prototype scales well with the number of domains advertised and connectivity services provisioned. TRUE pub

Quality of Service (QoS) constraints are crucial in 5G networks. The paper presents a provisioning strategy for connectivity services with different priorities based on reinforcement learning able to accommodate QoS requirements while maximizing provider profits.

In a centralized radio access network (C-RAN) scenario the joint coordination of radio (e.g., remote radio units, baseband units) and transport (e.g., optical cross connects) resources can be achieved via software defined networking (SDN) control plane, where a global orchestrator harmonizes the use of resources across all network segments. The more accurate the information about each domain (i.e., the abstraction of wireless and transport resources) is, the better will be the outcome of the orchestration work. This letter presents three transport resources abstraction models along with their corresponding orchestration policies. Their performance are compared showing that there is not a single best abstraction strategy that fits all the cases. If radio resources are scarce compared to transport resources, complex transport abstraction models are not needed. Contrariwise, if enough radio resources are widely available, more detailed abstraction models are required for achieving good network performance, but at the expense of an increased implementation complexity.

The paper proposes a survivable and programmable metro-scale converged inter- and intra-datacenter network architecture and exploits its unique features for allocating jointly IT and connectivity resources. The proposed dynamic provisioning strategy offers a substantial reduction of service request blocking.

High reliability performance of network is essential to minimize the possible network service interruption time, particularly in optical backbone networks where a large amount of data can be affected by a single failure. The existing studies on improvement of network reliability performance assume that failures of network devices are not related to the traffic load, which on the other hand, is not always true. For example, the lifetime of erbium doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) depends on the number of amplified lightpaths passing through. Encouraged by this observation, in this paper, we investigate the impact of used routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) algorithm on the number of failures in the network, and as a consequence on the network operational cost related to the failure reparation. We propose and evaluate a novel RWA approach, referred to as reliability performance aware RWA (RA-RWA), taking into account particular EDFA reliability performance characteristics with the goal of reducing the number of EDFA failures. The assessment results show that the operational cost related to EDFA failure reparation is impacted by the chosen RWA. The proposed RA-RWA provides 6% reduction, while other analyzed RWA algorithm, i.e., least loaded path (LLP), causes significant rise (up to 27%) of EDFA related failure reparation cost compared to the classical shortest path (SP) approach. In addition, RA-RWA offers further benefits in terms of reduced blocking probability compared to the SP. Concluding, we show that considering device reliability performance characteristics in RWA is important for the optical network operators as it can impact the network operational cost related to EDFA failure reparation.

Base station (BS) densification is increasingly adopted by mobile operators in order to support increasing traffic demand. However, a large number of BSs requires many backhaul connections, which may be very expensive. For this reason, provisioning high speed backhaul connections to BSs in a cost-effective way is challenging, and it is important to efficiently utilize an existing fixed network infrastructure if possible. This paper proposes two optimized infrastructure-aware planning strategies for small cells and fiber backhaul. The first strategy is referred to as joint design (JD) and is based on the joint cost minimization of small cells and fiber backhaul. The JD strategy is compared to a traditional design (TD) solution based on a two-step optimization approach. In the latter a cost-optimal small cells placement is identified first, then the corresponding minimum cost fiber backhaul deployment is determined accordingly. A comparison between these two approaches in dense 5G urban scenarios shows that the relative performance of JD and TD largely depends on the expected traffic demand and on the existing infrastructure. In dense urban areas with the average traffic levels expected for the year 2020 and beyond, JD returns up to 50% lower deployment cost in a greenfield scenario, and up to 70% lower deployment cost in a brownfield scenario. Only in areas with extremely high traffic demand (e.g., open-air festivals and stadiums) JD returns deployment costs very similar to TD.

This paper shows how programmability can improve operators’ revenues and it presents a dynamic resource slicing policy that leads to more than one order of magnitude better resource utilization levels than convectional (static) allocation strategies. QC 20161116

Future 5G networks will rely on the coordinated allocation of compute, storage, and networking resources in order to meet the functional requirements of 5G services as well as guaranteeing efficient usage of the network infrastructure. However, the 5G service provisioning paradigm will also require a unified infrastructure service market that integrates multiple operators and technologies. The 5G Exchange (5GEx) project, building heavily on the Software-Defined Network (SDN) and the Network Function Virtualization (NFV) functionalities, tries to overcome this market and technology fragmentation by designing, implementing, and testing a multi-domain orchestrator (MdO) prototype for fast and automated Network Service (NS) provisioning over multiple-technologies and spanning across multiple operators. This paper presents a first implementation of the 5GEx MdO prototype obtained by extending existing open source software tools at the disposal of the 5GEx partners. The main functions of the 5GEx MdO prototype are showcased by demonstrating how it is possible to create and deploy NSs in the context of a Slice as a Service (SlaaS) use-case, based on a multi-operator scenario. The 5GEx MdO prototype performance is experimentally evaluated running validation tests within the 5GEx sandbox. The overall time required for the NS deployment has been evaluated considering NSs deployed across two operators. TRUE pub

Providing high capacity to the end users is one of the main challenges for the fifth generation (5G) of mobile networks. The users’ habit to consume online contents indoor makes the outdoor-to-indoor capacity provisioning impractical, especially when the high-frequency bands proposed for 5G are employed. The centralized radio architecture (CRA) is an in-building solution, which relies on the centralization of baseband processing functions, fully or partly allowing for centralized cell management while providing signals directly inside the buildings. On the other hand, the massive deployment of CRAs in urban areas may yield to unacceptably high installation costs, due to the radio network equipment to be activated. To make CRAs appealing to mobile operators, we propose different deployment strategies to minimize the CRA deployment cost. We define the remote radio unit placement (RRUP) problem and formulate it as an integer linear program, obtaining optimal deployment solutions in small urban residential scenarios. We prove the RRUP problem to be NP-hard, requiring heuristic approaches to solve large problem instances. To this end, we propose an effective and scalable heuristic for minimizing the amount of radio equipment required to deploy CRAs in large urban areas.

The use of an optical fiber infrastructure to accommodate cloud services is gaining a lot of momentum. This is mainly driven by the bandwidth and latency performance that optical transmission can guarantee. On the other hand failures in the optical infrastructure may result in the concurrent loss of a possibly high number of cloud services. For this reason, being able to offer cloud service resiliency at a contained cost is of the utmost importance for operators. This paper proposes a heuristic for the restoration of optical cloud services in the presence of a single fiber link failure. The heuristic leverages on two parameters specified in the service class (i.e., restoration delay and bandwidth degradation) in order to make the best use of the available optical resources during the recovery process. The numerical results presented in the paper show that the proposed restoration algorithm is able to improve cloud service restorability without a negative impact on the cloud service blocking probability.

We demonstrate how SDN and NFV can bring end-to-end programmability to heterogeneous technology domains including optical transport, radio and cloud networks, which can in turn be leveraged for agile and resource-optimized service creation.

Centralized radio access network (C-RAN) has been considered as an architectural solution able to reduce capital and operational expenditure in dense 5G cellular networks while allowing better network performance. The C-RAN approach decouples baseband units from antenna sites and places them in selected locations, connected by the so-called fronthaul links. These links require expensive high-capacity connections, thus calling for cost-efficient deployment. This paper presents a hybrid fronthaul solution for C-RAN based on both optical fibers and free-space optics (FSO) to enhance fronthaul flexibility and minimize deployment costs. Two design strategies based on integer linear programming are proposed for both greenfield and brownfield deployments. The first strategy is referred to as joint planning (JP) and is based on the joint minimization of the number of deployed remote radio heads (RRHs) and the cost of the hybrid fiber/FSO fronthaul. The second strategy is based on two-step disjoint planning (DP) that first identifies a cost-optimal RRH placement and then finds the corresponding minimum cost deployment for the fronthaul links. Results obtained with JP and DP are compared in dense urban area scenarios (i.e., with characteristics similar to festivals or concerts), highlighting the advantage of the JP approach compared to DP, both in terms of costs and an enhanced flexibility during the network design process.

Communication networks continue to experience an increase in traffic volumes, number of connected devices, and users. For this reason, the energy consumption due to the communication infrastructure became an important parameter to be carefully considered and optimized during both network design and live operations. In this paradigm, optical transmission technologies offer the possibility to significantly lower the overall energy consumption level of communication networks. For this reason, there is a growing interest on how to take advantage of the energy-saving opportunities provided by optical networks. In addition, there are also parallel research efforts targeting the improvement of the energy efficiency of optical networks themselves. Despite this very vibrant research area, there are still a number of open questions that need to be addressed and new research directions have been recently opened in the field of energy-efficient optical networks. For example, the energy consumption levels in an optical network cannot be lowered at the expenseof other networkperformanceparameters (e.g., connection survivability, latency, average component reliability levels). As a result, energy-efficient schemes in optical networks have now been tailored to limit their impact on the Quality of Service (QoS) level of the provisioned connections. New network architectures have also been considered

This paper proposes two wavelength overprovisioning strategies that can be used to improve the performance of path restoration in optical core networks under dynamic traffic conditions while considering single fiber link failure scenarios. The study presented in the paper shows that with the two proposed schemes it is possible to achieve nearly the same level of average connection availability and restorability typical of dedicated path protection schemes (i.e., 100%) with, on the other hand, better blocking probability performance.

Each mobile network architecture able to meet the traffic requirements of future 5G services comes with its own set of benefits vs. requirements for the radio and the transport segments. This paper focuses on the energy performance of four mobile network architectures, each one with different splitting options for the baseband processing functions. The radio segment under exam is based on a new radio access technology referred to as 5G-NX, while the transport segment is based on wavelength division multiplexing (WDM). The energy consumption of each mobile network architecture is weighted against (i) the benefits for the radio segment as a function of the level of centralization of the baseband processing resources and (ii) the required transport capacity and consequently the power consumption levels needed to accommodate the backhaul, midhaul, and/or fronthaul traffic generated at each base station. Our results show that a fully centralized radio access network (C-RAN) with centralization of all the baseband functions is not a practical approach for 5G mobile networks, while a partially centralized C-RAN architecture in which the physical layer baseband processing is performed at the base station site represents a promising solution.

A Centralized Radio Architecture (CRA) allows for the coordination of the physical layer functions of macro and small cells. Efficient techniques can be introduced based on the CRA concept, but deployment cost could potentially increase if CRA networks are not carefully designed. This paper proposes a number of design strategies aimed at cost minimization for CRA networks in residential areas based on heuristics which easily scale with the number of indoor antennas. A few different algorithms, which aim at reducing the overall amount of equipment to cover the area, are described and compared.

The traffic in mobile access networks is increasing at an exponential rate, with the majority of this traffic being generated indoor. To cope with this trend, heterogeneous network (HetNet) architectures based on the centralized radio architecture (CRA) concept have been recently proposed. A CRA network is able to reach high wireless network performance by centralizing the radio physical layer functions of macro and small cells. On the other hand, a CRA network puts strict latency and capacity requirements on the transport segment, which usually comprises a mixture of fiber- and copper-based infrastructure. These strict constraints may translate into high deployment costs if not carefully addressed. This paper proposes an optimized deployment strategy for CRA networks in residential areas. The objective of the proposed strategy is to contain the total deployment cost by minimizing the number of wireless and transport resources required. We demonstrate that our deployment strategy allows for a significant reduction of the required amount of network components and the overall network cost compared to the existing deployment solutions.

We investigate how to reduce the deployment cost of heterogeneous mobile networks by joint dimensioning small cells and optical transport resources. The proposed heuristic is able to save 24% of total network deployment cost.

We present a framework able to limit the device lifetime degradation in optical backbone networks using sleep-mode-based green strategies. Results show that our approach manages the lifetime while not compromising significantly the energy saving performance. QC 20160811

Next generation 5G mobile system will support the vision of connecting all devices that benefit from a connection, and support a wide range of services. Consequently, 5G transport networks need to provide the required capacity, latency, and flexibility in order to integrate the different technology domains of radio, transport, and cloud. This paper outlines the main challenges, which the 5G transport networks are facing and discusses in more detail data plane, control architectures, and the tradeoff between different network abstraction models. QC 20160518

The orchestration of radio, transport, and cloud resources is a key enabler for efficient service delivery in 5G networks. Orchestration can be achieved with a hierarchical software-defined networking (SDN) control architecture in which a global orchestrator operates above the domain controllers. In such an architecture, the abstraction of resources between the controllers and the orchestrator plays a fundamental role for the system performance. In order to reduce the orchestrator complexity, the controllers should hide as much detail as possible from the orchestrator. On the other hand, the more details are available to the orchestrator the more optimal resource orchestration strategy can be obtained. In order to assess this trade-off, we recently proposed two transport abstraction models, namely big switch (BiS) and virtual link (VL), for centralized radio access networks (C-RANs) with orchestration of radio and transport resources. We observed that VL can provide a more efficient resource orchestration than BiS at the expense of an increased implementation complexity. The contribution of this paper is twofold. We extend the BiS and VL models to make them applicable to any orchestration scenario. Then, we propose a new transport abstraction model, referred to as optical transport transformation (OTT), that aims at achieving efficient resource orchestration with a reduced implementation complexity. We compare the performance of these new abstraction models in a C-RAN use case in which backhaul and fronthaul traffic are carried over a dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) network. Our results prove that in a C-RAN the best choice for the transport abstraction model depends on the availability and the reachability of the radio resources. If radio resources are scarce compared to transport resources, complex transport abstraction models are not needed and a BiS abstraction is the best choice. On the other hand, if radio resources are widely available and reachable, an OTT model guarantees the best overall performance. QC 20160829

A centralized network control and management plane, such as the one based on a path computation element (PCE), is highly beneficial in terms of resource optimization in wavelength division multiplexing optical networks. Benefits of centralized provisioning are even more evident when connection requests are provisioned in batches, i.e., they allow a better use of network resources via concurrent optimization. In this study, a dynamic bulk provisioning framework is presented with the objective of optimizing the use of network resources that also presents, as an additional benefit, the ability to yield a reduction of the control plane overhead. The rationale behind the proposed framework is based on a mechanism in which the PCE client is allowed to bundle and simultaneously send multiple labeled switch path (LSP) requests to the PCE where, in turn, several bundles can be concurrently processed together as a single bulk. From the network deployment perspective, a PCE-based network architecture is proposed to practically realize this approach. For dynamic bulk provisioning of optical LSP requests, a time-efficient integer linear programming (ILP) model (LSP_ BP_ ILP) is presented to minimize the request blocking, the network resource consumption, and the network congestion. In addition, a heuristic based on a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP), namely LSP_BP_GRASP, is also proposed as a scalable alternative. The presented results demonstrate significant advantages of the proposed PCE bulk provisioning framework based on concurrent optimization in terms of reduced blocking probability and control overhead when compared with conventional dynamic connection provisioning approaches processing a single connection request at a time.

Energy consumption in optical backbone networks is increasing due to two main reasons: (i) the exponential growth of bandwidth demands, and (ii) the increase in availability requirements in order to guarantee protection of the ultra high capacity optical channels provided by wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) networks. Although state of the art reliability mechanisms are very efficient in guaranteeing high availability, they do not consider the impact of the protection resources on the network's energy consumption. Dedicated (1:1) path protection (DPP) is a well-known mechanism that provides one extra link-disjoint path for the protection of a connection request. This secondary path is reserved and maintained in an active mode even though it is not utilized most of the time. This means that in-line optical amplifiers and switching nodes/ports are always consuming power even when they are not used to reroute any primary traffic. Moreover secondary paths are on average longer than their respective primary paths. These observations motivated us to investigate the energy savings, when all unused protection resources can be switched into a low-power, stand-by state (or sleep mode) during normal network operation and can be activated upon a failure. It is shown that significant reduction of power consumption (up to 25%) can be achieved by putting protection resources into sleep mode. Moreover, in order to enhance this energy saving figure, this paper proposes and evaluates different energy-efficient algorithms, specifically tailored around the sleep mode option, to dynamically provision 1:1 dedicated path protected connection. The trade-off between energy saving and blocking probability is discussed and an efficient mechanism to overcome this drawback is devised. Our results reveal that a 34% reduction of energy consumption can be obtained with a negligible impact on the network's blocking performance.

This feature issue is based on extended and revised versions of the top-ranked papers presented at the Optical Networks and Systems (ONS) Symposium that took place during the IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM 2017). The papers appearing in this Feature Issue cover a wide range of topics, including elastic optical networks, mobile fronthaul, network function virtualization, survivability, and hybrid datacenter networks.

One class of wireless sensor networks makes use of sensor nodes that recharge their batteries by harvesting energy from the surrounding environment. Being continuously recharged, the battery does not need to be replaced regularly and the sensor node is maintenance-free. A key module in such sensor network solutions is the data link automatic repeat request (ARQ) protocol, which must be designed to reliably deliver sensor nodes data at the minimum energy cost. With this objective in mind, two ARQ protocol classes are compared. In one class, each sensor node operates individually. In the other, the concept of cooperative communications is adopted, whereby neighboring sensor nodes help each other during the retransmission process. It is shown that the use of cooperative ARQ protocols in energy harvesting sensor networks enables sensor nodes to balance their energy consumption to match their own battery recharge rate. In turn, a balanced energy consumption-to-recharge rate ratio has the potential to improve the network throughput. Both classes of ARQ protocols are analyzed and compared. Estimated throughput gains are discussed under various network scenarios.

Long-reach passive optical networks (LR-PONs) are able to effectively support the growing demand of traffic originating from residential and business customers. Failures of metro/core (M/C) nodes serving the traffic to/from the access networks covered by LR-PONs, may potentially affect hundreds or thousands of customers. One way of guaranteeing 100% survivability from single-node failures is to apply dual-homing, where each LR-PON is connected to two M/C nodes, and combine it with node-disjoint dedicated-path protection (DPP). In this paper, we present a new approach to provide network survivability against single M/C node failures. Instead of applying dedicated path protection (DPP) strategy, which can require huge amount of extra resources, we combine an unprotected network design with a dynamic multilayer restoration algorithm. Our aim is to determine a suitable amount of resource overbuild (in terms of extra transponders) needed to provide average connection availability close to that guaranteed by DPP. Preliminary results show that dimensioning for the worst-case scenario among a set of predefined M/C node failures, i.e., the one disrupting the highest number of connections, yields to a cost-effective strategy requiring up to 35% less transponders than DPP, while offering the same average connection availability.

International audience; This chapter first highlights the significant energy consumption of existing wired communication networks. It considers various means of operating such networks more efficiently. Then, the chapter examines the components that make up a wired communications network and their differing characteristics between the access and core, as well as patterns of traffic behavior. The chapter focuses on static (network planning) and dynamic (traffic-engineering) schemes that can be used to reduce the energy consumption of networks. It also pays attention to a number of challenges/open research questions that need to be resolved before the implementation of such schemes. These include issues with migration and resilience. The chapter then deals with economic-, regulatory-, and business-related methods. Finally, it focuses on the architecture of communication networks and the corresponding relationship with energy usage.

The paper studies the improvement of cloud service restoration by combining the service degradation and relocation concepts. Results demonstrate that it is possible to achieve improvements in both ...

We present the LIFETEL project, whose aim is trying to increase the device lifetime in telecommunication networks by exploiting energy-efficient techniques. In particular, we show that the lifetime of a device might increase when it is put in sleep mode. However, the device lifetime might decrease when power state variations (from sleep mode to full power) occur very frequently. Thus, there is a trade-off between the duration of sleep mode and its frequency. Moreover, we report a lifetime analysis for cellular and backbone devices, showing that the electricity saving may be exceeded by the costs due to the fact that Devices fail more frequently compared to the situation in which they are always powered on. Thus, we claim that energy-aware network algorithms should be redesigned in order not to impact and to increase (when possible) the lifetime of network devices.

Future 5G systems will pave the way to a completely new societal paradigm where access to information will be available anywhere, anytime, and to anyone or anything. Most of the ongoing research and debate around 5G systems are focusing on the radio network segment (e.g., how to offer high peak-rates per subscriber, and how to handle a very large number of simultaneously connected devices without compromising on coverage, outage probability, and latency). On the other hand, understanding the impact that 5G systems will have on the transport network (i.e., the segment in charge of the backhaul of radio base stations and/or the fronthaul of remote radio units) is also very important. This paper provides an analysis of the key architectural challenges for the design of a flexible 5G transport infrastructure able to adapt in a cost-efficient way to the plethora of requirements coming from the large number of envisioned future 5G services.

With the advent of 5G, fixed wireless access (FWA) has emerged as a promising candidate for rolling out fixed broadband services. By means of radio simulations, we define a 5G radio deployment scenario for FWA that can meet the service requirements of future fixed broadband access. Different transport requirements imposed by different radio access network (RAN) split options are considered and a broad range of optical transport technologies/systems to support the FWA scenario is analyzed. For higher-layer RAN split options, we find that conventional 10G passive optical networks (XG-PONs) and coarse wavelength-division multiplexing (CWDM) technologies are the most cost effective. CWDM provides improved support for low-latency services while XG-PON facilitates future migration to fiber to the home. For lower-layer RAN splits, point-to-point (PtP) fiber or PtP-WDM is required. In the considered scenario, CWDM and PtP technologies are found to be the most cost effective.

Optical clouds allow for an integrated management of optical transport and cloud resources (e.g., storage and computing resources running on datacenters). In this paradigm the concept of service re ...

Wireless heterogeneous networks (HetNets) based on small cells are a cost and energy efficient alternative to provide high capacity to the end users. On the other hand, the cost and energy consumpt ...

The expected growth of traffic demand may lead to a dramatic increase in the network energy consumption, which needs to be handled in order to guarantee scalability and sustainability of the infrastructure. There are many efforts to improve energy efficiency in communication networks, ranging from the component technology to the architectural and service-level approaches. Because data centers and content delivery networks are responsible for the majority of the energy consumption in the information and communication technology sector, in this paper we address network energy efficiency at the architectural and service levels and propose a unified network architecture that provides both intra-data-center and inter-data-center connectivity together with interconnection toward legacy IP networks. The architecture is well suited for the carrier cloud model, where both data-center and telecom infrastructure are owned and operated by the same entity. It is based on the hybrid optical switching (HOS) concept for achieving high network performance and energy efficiency. Therefore, we refer to it as an integrated HOS network. The main advantage of the integration of core and intra-data-center networks comes from the possibility to avoid the energy-inefficient electronic interfaces between data centers and telecom networks. Our results have verified that the integrated HOS network introduces a higher number of benefits in terms of energy efficiency and network delays compared to the conventional nonintegrated solution. At the service level, recent studies demonstrated that the use of distributed video cache servers can be beneficial in reducing energy consumption of intra-data-center and core networks. However, these studies only take into consideration conventional network solutions based on IP electronic switching, which are characterized by relatively high energy consumption. When a more energy-efficient switching technology, such as HOS, is employed, the advantage of using distributed video cache servers becomes less obvious. In this paper we evaluate the impact of video servers employed at the edge nodes of the integrated HOS network to understand whether edge caching could have any benefit for carrier cloud operators utilizing a HOS network architecture. We have demonstrated that if the distributed video cache servers are not properly dimensioned they may have a negative impact on the benefit obtained by the integrated HOS network.

Survivable synthetic ROADMs are equipped with redundant switching modules to support failure recovery. The paper proposes a dynamic connection provisioning strategy which exploits these idle redundant modules to provision regular traffic resulting in a substantial improvement in the blocking performance.

Heterogeneous network (HetNet) deployment strategies have the potential to improve the energy efficiency of mobile access networks. One key aspect to consider in HetNets is the impact of the power consumption of the backhaul, i.e., the overall energy efficiency of a HetNet deployment is affected by the backhaul technology and architecture. This paper presents a preliminary assessment of the design challenges of a future green backhaul segment for a HetNet deployment. The study is based on the analysis of the medium term future outlook (i.e., between now and the year 2025) of the main technologies used in todays'* backhaul networks (i.e., fiber, microwave and copper). It can be concluded that, even if there arc no doubts that both microwave and fiber will be predominately used in the future, the possible migration paths leading to such fiber- and microwave-dominated scenarios might be different, depending on factors such as spectrum and license costs, time to deployment, availability of equipment, and required Quality of Service (QoS) levels.