Data traffic on metropolitan access and aggregation networks is set to increase by 560 percent by 2017, driven by demand for video and the proliferation of data centers, said a Bell Labs study by Alcatel-Lucent.
By 2017 more than 75 percent of that traffic will stay in metro networks, as compared to 57 percent today.
Traffic from video services will increase 720 percent and data center traffic will increase more than 440 percent.
Combined, video and data centre traffic are the key drivers to the overall forecast increase of 560 percent traffic growth in the metro.
Cloud and data center traffic – consumer connections to data centers and interconnection between data centers – will increase 440 percent by 2017.
Total Metro traffic will grow approximately two times faster than traffic going into the backbone network by 2017.
By 2017, 75 percent of total traffic will terminate within the metro network and 25 percent of traffic will traverse the backbone network as video, data and web content is increasingly sourced from within metro networks.
The growth is expected to have a considerable impact on service providers’ networks. They will need to evolve to a new type of network architecture – optimized for the cloud – that will help control costs, guarantee quality and deliver new revenue-generating services to connect users and the cloud.
To address this need, service providers must move towards a cloud–optimized network, leveraging integrated IP, optical and management solutions together with software-defined networking (SDN). This will allow them to deploy networks that meet dynamic and rapid growth in customer demand for video and other high-bandwidth cloud services with instantaneous access over the metro network.
Basil Alwan, head of IP Routing and Transport for Alcatel-Lucent, said: “Alcatel-Lucent will continue to develop a more SDN-enabled IP and optical portfolio to allow networks to evolve even further into a virtualized environment.”
