Designing 21st Century Communications: Architecture, Services, Technology, and Facilities

Increasing demand for new applications and services, continuous technology innovation, and rapidly changing economics are motivating the creation of a fundamentally new architecture for 21 century digital communications. Traditional architectural models for communications have been oriented toward meeting exacting requirements of a finite set of well-defined services, essentially, a fixed set of modalities, with well known and well defined parameters. Consequently, this infrastructure has become a restrictive barrier to the deployment of new and enhanced services and capabilities. Meeting the many requirement challenges of continual change requires replacing traditional rigid designs with those that are significantly more flexible and customizable. Often, advances in networking are measured only by increased capacity, and certainly substantially more capacity is required. Fortunately, advanced optical technologies have been created to support 100 Gbps and higher capabilities. However, high capacity alone does not guarantee high performance, and high performance capability does not guarantee required flexibility and determinism. Today, new types of digital communications infrastructure are being designed, prototyped, and provisioned in early implementations. These new design provide for a foundation infrastructure consisting of discoverable, reconfigurable resources that can be dynamically integrated and used. This infrastructure can be considered a programmable platform that can support many more services than traditional deployments, including highly differentiated and deterministic services.