Enterprise Network Trends

Enterprise Network Trends

This chapter has mentioned some of the many trends in enterprise networks; they are summarized here. First, today there is more intelligence in the environment. We are moving to an era of ubiquitous, or pervasive, computing, which means that intelligence is being embedded into everyday objects. As these objects become intelligent, they communicate with each other, and hence they need network access points. Network intelligence is increasingly moving toward the edge, so policy management, proper QoS mapping, and aggregation of packets is increasingly occurring at the edge of the network. The current trend is for the core to become fast but dumb. However, the debate over the pros and cons of intelligence at the edge versus intelligence in the core has swung back and forth over the years. The reigning trend ultimately depends on what forces (technological, market, policy, regulatory, legal) are at work and which players dominate at any point in time.

We continue to see the emergence of very high-bandwidth, low-latency multimedia applications, and the bandwidth explosion that's under way will make it possible for content developers to create interesting new applications. We're also seeing more reliance on personal computing and communications, although the network touch points will change with personal digital assistants, intelligent appliances, and wearables.

We're also seeing a growing base of high-end routing systems as the old 80/20 scenario is reversing: Today 80% of information exchange is not occurring within locations but between different companies that work together either as allies or partners or that serve one another in some way. User devices are becoming increasingly smart, running with higher-level protocols, and everyone wants to be networked. The new applications, especially those in multimedia, video, and other streaming environments, are more bandwidth intensive, and they are also extremely delay sensitive.

The emerging enterprise network is characterized as being one that provides high capacity and most campus networks are reengineering to the Gigabit Ethernet standard. They will migrate to even higher rates, but at the moment, this migration means simply throwing bandwidth at the problem. You can support high-bandwidth applications with additional bandwidth, but remember that Ethernet does not offer good QoS. Therefore, when multimedia applications are the most dominant application type, we may have to shift to a different architecture to one that supports QoS. Low delay is also necessary to support real-time flows, as is efficient support for bursty traffic, so the benefits of statistical multiplexing are needed. Networks need cost-effective end-to-end connectivity to handle the growing range of touch points, and we need a way to easily manage, reassign, and reallocate networks through standardized interfaces. In the not-too-distant future, we should see incredible advances on these fronts.

For more learning resources, quizzes, and discussion forums on concepts related to this chapter, see www.telecomessentials.com/learningcenter.

 



Telecommunications Essentials
Telecommunications Essentials: The Complete Global Source for Communications Fundamentals, Data Networking and the Internet, and Next-Generation Networks
ISBN: 0201760320
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 84

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