The impact of capacity growth in national telecommunications networks

Abstract

This paper discusses both UK-based and global Internet data bandwidth growth, beginning with historical data for the BT network. We examine the time variations in consumer behaviour and how this is statistically aggregated into larger traffic loads on national core fibre communications networks. The random nature of consumer Internet behaviour, where very few consumers require maximum bandwidth simultaneously, provides the opportunity for a significant statistical gain. The paper looks at predictions for how this growth might continue over the next 10-20 years, giving estimates for the amount of bandwidth that networks should support in the future. The paper then explains how national networks are designed to accommodate these traffic levels, and the various network roles, including access, metro and core, are described. The physical layer network is put into the context of how the packet and service layers are designed and the applications and location of content are also included in an overall network overview. The specific role of content servers in alleviating core network traffic loads is highlighted. The status of the relevant transmission technologies in the access, metro and core is given, showing that these technologies, with adequate research, should be sufficient to provide bandwidth for consumers in the next 10-20 years.

Performance limits in optical communications due to fiber nonlinearity

“…Section 4.2 shows that there is a clear maximum deliverable signal to noise ratio for multi-channel optical communication systems using conventional system designs. Commercially available products are rapidly approaching this limit, whilst historical trends [3,4] and industry forecasts [195][196] suggest that demand will continue to grow exponentially. Although it is perhaps unwise to rely solely on a single forecast and historical trends all other indicators confirm the need for continued growth in the volume of traffic transported across the network.…”

Availability‐driven optimal design of shared path protection in WDM networks

“…Hence, the heuristic finds, at each iteration, the pair of connections (c, i) with i ∈ X All c that attains the maximum benefit B c,i as a candidate to share backup wavelengths. Next, to ensure that all connections meet the availability constraint formulated in (9), for each iteration of the greedy algorithm the fulfillment of the following expression is evaluated:…”

“…As a result of the high data transmission capacity of WDM networks, the growing access to the Internet by the world population and the continuous emergence of new networked multimedia applications, the traffic transported by the Internet increases significantly each year: annual traffic growth between 25 and 70% has been reported [9], with an accumulated growth of 887.9% in the period 2000-2016 [18] and more than 3566 million Internet users around the world on June 30, 2016.…”

Strategies for Upgrading an Operator's Backbone Network Beyond the C-Band: Towards Multi-Band Optical Networks

“…Citation information: DOI 10.1109/JPHOT.2021.3054849, IEEE Photonics Journal highly-aggregated flows. This becomes increasingly difficult with the emergence of dramatically more dynamic traffic patterns [1]. The exploitation of the ultimate bandwidth potential of single mode fibre (SMF) in conjunction with EONcompatible transmission systems is providing a tangible solution to these challenges.…”