Imagine planning a party. You decide how many people to invite, choose a
venue with enough room for your guests and
plan for their arrival. But what do you do if you invite a hundred people and
instead three thousand turn up? This is exactly the dilemma facing today’s
service providers.
The Internet’s original core infrastructure was developed using scaled-up
legacy enterprise products. These legacy products are in stark contrast to
purpose-built Internet routers and do not offer the reliability, performance and
flexibility needed in the new broadband environment.
With the advent of broadband Internet and the new network services,
increasingly fast access technologies, including cable, fixed wireless and DSL,
are being deployed in the local loop. By 2005, Forrester Research predicts that
27 million European homes or 18 percent of the population will have broadband
access. Therefore, a robust and scaleable core infrastructure capable of
handling massive traffic loads is essential. Without a strengthened backbone in
place, many of the promises of broadband – such as high-speed access and
converged communication – are mere fantasies.
The Importance of Core Performance
In today’s competitive Internet market, a highly intelligent and speedy
infrastructure is crucial in order to meet ever-higher customer demands, but the
combined pressure of extra services and additional users poses threats to
service quality. For example, in order to effectively deliver advanced services,
routing technology sitting at the core of the Internet must be able to handle
traditional data traffic alongside new multi-service traffic, and maintain
forwarding performance during route fluctuations and congestion.
Legacy routers simply cannot keep pace with the demands of today’s
broadband networking environment. Why? First, their original design was centered
on the modest expectations of slower, less widespread Internet access and was
merely scaled up rather than redesigned. Second, they were designed for typical
loads rather than for exceptional conditions. The current high level of Internet
Protocol (IP) traffic over the in2frastructure was planned for within newer,
purpose-built Internet routers such as those from Juniper Networks.
Network surges are handled with speed and intelligence, using a combination
of electronic and optical network connections.
Core networks, with legacy routers, struggle to keep up with demand as
broadband permeates business and consumer premises. Designing networks around
normal operating conditions are not good enough to ensure the rock solid
stability the Internet requires. Packet forwarding performance goals are often
calculated by taking a mean of IP traffic characteristics to derive an average
packet size.
This over-simplistic design fails in two areas. First, it does not simulate a
realistic Internet environment, which is one of routing fluctuations, large
bursts of traffic and congestion. Second, packet-sized distribution is actually
multi-modal – meaning that IP traffic characteristics cannot be accurately
described by averages.
Another factor is the rate of traffic growth; enterprise traffic grows by 15
percent per year and can be accommodated by a legacy router through annual
upgrades and replacement after three years. However, IP traffic grows by 300
percent and, in order to accommodate such growth, the legacy router would need
an upgrade every month and replacement after six months. Purpose-built
architecture for service provision has to work well within its limits at initial
deployment, so that it can have a realistic usable life.
A Growing Need for Speed
Even with specially designed network architectures that go beyond the
"best effort" offering of legacy routers, problems, such as internal
fiber cuts and device failures, still occur. As the number of ISPs increases, so
does the number of interconnections. Since users and providers do not control
the architecture or operations of peer networks, these interconnections create
instability in the routing mesh. All these factors add up to a potentially
unstable network.
Some ISPs gain competitive advantage by carefully engineering their core
network traffic to maximize use of circuits as well as reliability. To
effectively engineer traffic, traffic rates and trends must be understood
between network entry and exit points. Also, there must be the ability to guide
traffic to available bandwidth, as opposed to simpler decisions such as the
shortest path through the network. ISPs formerly accomplished this by using
switches in their core networks and by creating switched paths that maximized
utilization of the network by routers.
Now, ISPs are exploring new technologies, specifically Multi Protocol Label
Switching (MPLS), to gain traffic-engineering capabilities on core routers. MPLS
speeds up network traffic by setting up specific paths diverted around congested
parts of the network–making the Internet quicker, easier to manage and more
reliable.
In this competitive market and potentially volatile networking environment,
service providers can no longer afford anything less than a reliable,
high-performance network designed and built for all conditions. Designing
networks based on scaled up enterprise equipment, around the principle of normal
operating conditions, is not sufficient and will not deliver IP traffic at the
speeds and quantities demanded in a growing broadband environment.
Value-added Broadband Services
The emerging broadband debate, together with competition and the growing
pressures for business advantage, are driving the need for multiple and diverse
service offerings, such as Voice over IP (VoIP), Video on Demand (VoD), Class of
Service (CoS) and Multicasting. In turn, bandwidth needs are increasing, as is
the scale of the Internet. During the phenomenal rise of the modern Internet, it
has, until very recently, almost exclusively carried data traffic. In turn,
voice services have always been carried in their own environments, on technology
that has been matured by incumbent telcos. Broadcast media such as television
and radio used to be carried over the air, cable or satellite.
Even video conferencing was developed to run over dedicated circuit links.
Today, all of these content sources are looking to Internet transport – as IP
allows diverse technologies to converge onto a single infrastructure. Using a
common IP infrastructure provides many advantages, not only for service
providers who can realize large operational cost savings by converging their
separated networks, but also businesses and consumers who are benefiting from
new services and applications. This broadband Internet is becoming an essential
business tool.
The only way for operators to cope with these new service requirements is by
implementing a strong and robust infrastructure, which can deliver data, video
and voice traffic at a quality of service appropriate for business critical
communications. As more and more diverse applications emerge, wire-rate
forwarding performance becomes even more imperative.
While it is acceptable for Web Pages to load in an irregular order, with
images following a few seconds after text, users of any real time video or voice
service, including VoD, would rapidly become disinterested if the multimedia
packets were not delivered in real time.
Building a Network for Scaleable Services
Value-added services require more than best-effort delivery; infrastructures
must transmit packets at wire rate even during congestion. For example, today’s
CoS requirements dictate that premium customers get priority access to bandwidth
during periods of congestion. With wire-rate performance, forwarding never
becomes a bottleneck and service providers maintain the ability to offer CoS
because there is no contention for processing cycles to execute both forwarding
and CoS queue management.
Service providers need to start future proofing their core networks now. As
broadband Internet usage evolves to include VoIP, interactive gaming
applications and other services which increase the volume of small packets, it
will become highly undesirable and expensive to change infrastructure. The costs
of adding nodes is significant enough but the hidden costs of designing,
testing, deploying and maintaining infrastructure can be overwhelming and can
even prevent service providers from growing at the rate they need, to keep up
with the competitive Internet market.
If service providers cannot adequately deploy the available bandwidth today,
how can they reliably offer enhanced services in the future? If a lightly loaded
system cannot guarantee wire-rate performance for all packets, under all
networking conditions, how can service providers grow it to a heavily loaded
system seamlessly, and without unnecessary upgrades?
New routing technologies are taking advantage of new hardware, software and
processing advances in the heart of a robust IP backbone to enable the broadband
Internet. This new generation of routers must maintain network control functions
and implement packet based services while achieving packet forwarding rates at
the highest speeds available from optical transmission technology. Furthermore,
these routers must perform these processes consistently, without ever blocking
or delaying traffic, so the network can live up to the promise of high speed,
multimedia broadband access.
Statistics show that broadband is on its way, and service providers are
starting to recognize that they must ensure their infrastructures are fast,
reliable and efficient. Only this will spell the end of the worldwide wait for
voice, video and data traffic. The broadband promise of real time multimedia
applications will not become a reality without the core deployment of robust IP
routers. It is the core technologies that will enable service providers to
deliver value added services, thus building revenues and recouping their vast
investments on upgrading access networks and ultimately securing their own
futures.
Alan Taylor, technical director EMEA, Juniper Networks
Characteristics and Benefits of Frame Relay
Characteristics and |
|
Characteristics |
Benefits |
Throughput — Frame Relay provides throughput comparable to private lines, supporting access speeds up to E1 and above. |
The wide range and mix of access speeds allows greater flexibility and increases available bandwidth for data intensive applications. |
Elimination of Overhead — Frame Relay eliminates the high overhead associated with X.25 that performs error correction and retransmission by relying on intelligent enduser devices to perform error correction and retransmission. |
Eliminating overheads lowers delays and improves throughput. It prevents the duplication of effort in the network |
Statistical Multiplexing — Compared to private lines, Frame Relay simplifies configurations because each Frame Relay site needs only one single physical access line to the Frame Relay service provider network to communicate with many sites. Over this single access line, multiple “conversations” take place over pre-defined Permanent Virtual Circuits (PVCs). While PVCs interconnect two sites, just as private lines do, bandwidth is shared rather than dedicated solely for the use of that link. |
Supporting multiple logical links over one physical line results in a reduction in CPE, port costs and the number of physical lines required to interconnect users. Because PVCs are pre-defined for each pair of end-point devices, a network path is always ready for the application, thus eliminating any call setup. This results in faster access to the network, thus providing faster response time for end users’ applications. |
Reliability — Packet switching inherently allows calls to be routed around failures within the network. Packet switching also allows many-to-many connectivity by using an addressing scheme to route calls. |
Re-routing protects the network from line and equipment failures, thus ensuring the transfer of critical data. |
Protocol Insensitive — Frame Relay provides a protocol transparent transport service for upper layer protocols. |
By encapsulating higher layer protocols, Frame Relay eliminates the need for protocol conversion. |
Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation — Frame Relay provides a bandwidth on demand service by allowing a user to potentially increase its bandwidth on a dynamic basis. |
As needed, customers can burst up to higher levels of throughput without paying for unused bandwidth. |
Standards Based Technology — Frame Relay is widely embraced by vendors and international standard bodies. |
Multi-vendor support allows rapid deployment of multi-vendor equipment. Thus, users can choose from many equipment companies that adhere to strict international frame relay standards. |