Network services really do underpin the amount of revenue that an operator can bring in. When you look at value-added services, you will soon find that they can provide a level of income that is beyond the core infrastructure. In this day and age, it’s safe to say that operators face a lot of challenges. They need to innovate, and they also need to offer a much wider choice of value-added offerings. On top of this, they need to try and reduce operating costs while deploying services at a faster rate. When you look at recent years, and the network community you will see that this is motivated by the aforementioned issues. If you want to find out more about that, then take a look below.
Automation, Agility, and Flexibility
Automation, agility, and flexibility are operating at a much faster market to time cycle, with the former being something that operators lack in this day and age. Network services and service orchestration are the primary value products for operators, and it enables them to monetise any infrastructure investments they make. Operator service profiles really do cover a huge range of functionalities, which span from basic connectivity services, which include IPTV delivery to secure connectivity which is conducted through business sites.
At the end of the day, this operator business model has been very successful in the past. As a consequence of this, network infrastructures really have expanded a lot over the more recent years and now operators are facing a lot of challenges in regards to maintaining high revenues while also trying to support new and innovative services. When you look at one hand, you will see that traffic volumes are increasing all the time and that forces operators to upgrade much more often too. Additionally, established service models are having to rely on manual configuration through engineers.
Requirements
When you look at a service orchestration, you will see that it is a very complex and high-level system. Research efforts have proposed a huge range of goals for any service orchestrator. The functional properties of this include coordination. Operator infrastructures comprise a huge range of computation and network systems, which can all provide a very diverse set of resources. This includes CPU and storage. Of course, effective deployment of network services really will depend on the coordinated configuration. The network manager must provision resources and then modify the forwarding policy. This is to ensure that connectivity between the services is functioning at the highest efficiency.
Automation
Existing infrastructures will actually incur a large operational workload when you look at the configuration. Networking technologies will provide different interfaces for every layer and this requires manual repetition. In addition to this, vertical integration for network devices really do require extensive human intervention. This is required to manage a network service in a multi-environment and multi-vendor environment. Of course, only time will tell what the future is going to hold but right now it looks like some significant changes need to be made.
