Abstract-It is envisaged that end-user access bandwidth requirements will notably increase in the coming years; at the same time, the number of connected mobile devices will also exponentially grow as the fully-digital connected homes (Internet of Things) becomes an everyday reality. This article presents an active remote node (ARN) at an intermediate location between the central office and end-user premises, as a flexible and future-proofed infrastructure topology approach for solving the associated bandwidth and wired-wireless convergence issues. The ARN represents the key architectural design innovation of the SODALES (Software-Defined Access using Low-Energy Subsystems) network. The rise of mobile communications, and the trend for seamless convergence between fixed and wireless networks is tending to make the purely passive approaches (e.g. as exemplified by passive optical networking (PON) access architectures) too restrictive, considering the modularity and flexibility offered by an active remote node. We present a performance analysis of the ARN node, to support the cost effectiveness of the proposed SODALES solution and to demonstrate the potential benefits in terms network performance, operational efficiency. and flexible functionality. Looking forward, future ARN capabilities can also he expected to include hierarchical caching. customer premises equipment (CPE) virtualization, and nearer to the end-user location of software-defined platforms supporting ubiquitous cloud services.
Keywords-access network convergence, active remote node. performance analysis
I. INTRODUCTION AND RELATED WORK
ten years [I]. With the rise of new content-rich services (e.g. HD on-demand video, new television formats such as Super HD 4k or Ultra HD 8k) it is expected that bandwidth requirements will continue to steadily increase [2]. The expected service bandwidth increase, jointly with the appearance in the arena of business and mobile backhaul applications, is likely to create a bottleneck in today's gigabit-class passive optical network (PON) deployments [3]. Such PON deployments between the central office (CO) and end-user have been the favored solution up to the present. In addition to the traditional services delivered both to wired and wireless end-user devices, the authors in PI also mention another set of trends driving up bandwidth demand provision, such as: (i) the increasing number of different devices connected to the Internet (considering a hilly-digital home, and the Internet of Things); (ii) the accessibility and availability of a huge range of Cloud services, for both business and residential users; (iii) the rise of online content distribution; and (iv) the coexistence of residential and business applications on a common access platform, which may drive the requirement for bandwidth-symmetric deployments. There is thus a techno-economic challenge to be addressed, in order to achieve such high-bandwidth access segments.
Give a brief summary of this material, and consideration of two points. First, this paper's and the books views of the convergence similar? Second, what is(are) the role(s) of protocols in the systems the paper discusses