According to a Bell Labs study published by Alcatel-Lucent, the data traffic on metropolitan ?metro? access and aggregation networks is set to increase by 560 per cent by 2017. Increasing demand for video and the proliferation of the data centres will contribute to the growth of data traffic on metro networks.
By 2017 more than 75 per cent of the projected data traffic will reside in metro networks, as compared to 57 per cent in 2013. The traffic from video services will increase by 720 per cent and data centre traffic will increase more than 440 per cent from 2013 to 2017. Together, video and data centre traffic are going to be the key drivers for the overall increase of 650 per cent in data traffic on metro networks. Further, the study indicates that ever increasing demand for ultra-broadband access, video, cloud and other high-bandwidth services is driving enterprises, communications service providers and webscale companies to bring content closer to their customers to better manage quality of experience and gain operational efficiencies.
The most popular video content, for example, is being cached deeper in the network so that it can be delivered to customers locally over metro networks rather than being accessed from a central cache over the backbone network. In addition, the growing demand for cloud services is leading enterprises and operators to add data centres within the metros in order to support service delivery.
The exponential growth in data traffic is expected to significantly impact service providers? networks. The operators will have to evolve into a new type of network architecture – optimised for the cloud. This strategy would help operators control costs, maintain quality and deliver new revenue-generating services to connect users and the cloud.
As per the study to address these issues service providers must move towards a cloud-optimised network, leveraging integrated IP, optical and management solutions along with software-defined networking. Such a strategy allow operators to deploy networks which will be capable of meeting dynamic and rapid growth in customer demand for video and other high-bandwidth cloud services with instantaneous access over the metro network.
