Tech Forecast Digest

Dynamic Communications Networks

Mobile devices and content, server virtualization, and advent of cloud services are among the trends driving emerging networking design. Both public and private cloud services are growing rapidly and customers want the agility to access applications, infrastructure, and other resources on demand and à la carte.

"Big data" sets require massive parallel processing on thousands of servers, which need connections to each other. The rise of mega datasets drives a constant demand for additional network capacity.

Software-defined networking (SDN) is a design concept that is dynamic, adaptable, and cost-effective. It is suitable for emerging information applications. SDN architectures decouple network control and routing functions, enabling network control to become independent of the underlying infrastructure, network services and applications.

Network function virtualization (NFV) provides flexibility for the physical location of the virtualized functions. There are benefits in using SDN concepts to implement and manage an NFV architecture.

Edge access to network routing and other processing elements will be via 5G and 5G+ wireless with typical available median bandwidths of 1 Gbps (which will support high quality full motion 3D video) increasing to 20 Gbps. This edge wireless access will be connected via long haul optical fiber that will support multi-Pbps per fiber (1 Petabit = 1000 Terabits) over distances of several thousand kilometers.

Eventually, dynamic mesh peer to peer networks will exist eliminating, at least to some extent, third party network services providers.

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