Separating the control plane from the forwarding plane is a primary design objective for telecommunications services. As the complexities of network services and policies continue to expand, a software-based control plane for Next Generation Networks (NGN) is a natural evolution, offering the ability to rapidly enable new services and sources of revenue for service providers and enterprises.
The simple distributed control plane in IP networks has served the industry well. Without it, the rapid growth of IP networks over the past 10 years would not have been sustainable. So, what is the problem? None, if the only service is best effort Web traffic and the network policy is to simply throw bandwidth at the problem. However, if you want to offer predictable services with guaranteed Service Level Agreements (SLAs) across a wide variety of traffic types cost effectively, the complexity of the control plane will increase dramatically. Looking at it from a different perspective, the fundamental task of the control plane is to implement network policies associated with services based on the current state of the network. If there is one service with a simple policy, a simple control plane will suffice. If there are multiple services with multiple network policies, then a more comprehensive and holistic view of the entire network (or networks) is required.
Service Providers have also organized their businesses around higher order applications: managed business services, connection oriented services such as VoIP and video over IP, IPTV, Internet and wholesale offerings (both outsourced and insourced). These services are layered over disparate physical infrastructures with different constraints. For example, in the metro aggregation, managing costs is critical with bandwidth increasing exponentially; the wide area network is based on IP/MPLS, while wireless networks are also seeing a bandwidth meltdown. Service Providers want to construct new services through component reuse instead of independent stovepipes which requires that these applications utilize a common physical infrastructure. However, there is a need to offer network virtualization into each of these areas. In order to effectively support network virtualization carriers have recognized the need to separate the data plane from the control plane.
And, since these virtual networks will span multiple equipment vendors, the control plane solution needs to be multivendor. The Soapstone PNC framework sits between the network virtualization and the physical network and hides the complexity of separate physical networks from higher order applications while still supporting network operations.
The only comprehensive dynamic control plane solution, Soapstone Networks PNC provides a state-of-the-art multi-vendor control plane designed to operate over transport technologies including Carrier Ethernet, MPLS, OTN and pure optical, as well as integrated technologies.
To learn more about Soapstone Networks PNC contact our Business Development office at 978.715.2300 or busdev@soapstonenetworks.com.