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Network Architecture Evolution: towards All-IP

Roberto Sabella
Manager of Innovation & Technology of Marconi SpA (the Italian R&D of Ericsson)
CoRiTeL - Technical Director
roberto.sabella@ericsson.com
Abstract New services, new applications, new profiles of clients, new networking

technologies and new forms of communications, such as peer-to-peer, and media/contentto-person, are all driving the need for a converged all-IP network that can provide an
agnostic layer between the service and transport layers. Designing and realizing such an
IP-based network architecture require a through understanding not only of IP networking
technology, but also the particular demands of delivering high-performance, real-time
services in a way that maintains the telecom grade performance; which means highreliability and high-quality of traditional telecommunications services. The talk reviews
the main technical challenges that allow the network to evolve towards a telecom-quality
IP-based network, and discusses the main research issues relating to that. Specifically, on
one hand IP technology is the enabler of adaptive and flexible connectivity. Its
connectionless structure, with its logical connectivity, provides new levels of scalability and
manageability that cant be matched by the hard-wired connection-oriented links of
legacy transport systems. Actually, the ability of IP makes a much-needed future-proofing,
insulating layer between the services above and the diverse transport technologies below;
especially when services and transport technologies are both evolving rapidly. On the
other hand, the generality of IP compared with the more-tailored-made transmission
technologies it is replacing, such as TDM and ATM, also presents challenges when
migrating the often QoS-sensitive and critical applications on to IP. To avoid putting at
risk existing revenue streams, the new technology must live up to telecom standards and
deliver telecom quality. The equipment, network architecture, planning and design of the
IP network must be able to support all the services operators want to offer, using any
access available.
Basically, telecom-quality IP networks, must deliver certain key characteristics: i) it must
enable operators to plan for the unknown, and support several different service
characteristics; ii) it must provide a flexible network architecture that brings the costefficiency of IP and associated technologies, such as Ethernet. To realize that kind of
networks it is necessary to deeply understand not only IP, but also the systems, services
and accesses involved, and the way the network is controlled and managed. It is not a
question of simply replacing protocols within the existing network architecture, neither it
is about importing the network designs of legacy best-effort IP networks into telecom
domain. Thus, there is a clear trend to push all services and accesses , including mobile
access networks, towards Ethernet/IP transport. This will require investment in highperformance, low latency and low packet loss, IP- and Ethernet-based transport
infrastructure over the next years.

Keywords- all-IP networks, next generation networks, telecom-quality IP networks

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Biography
Roberto Sabella is head of Innovation & Technology in Marconi SpA (the Ericsson
R&D company of Italy) and technical director of CoRiTeL. He received the degree
(Laurea in Italy) in electronics engineering in 1987, from the University of Rome La
Sapienza, Italy. He then joined Ericsson, where he was involved first in hardware
design and subsequently in research activties on fiber optic communications systems.
His research interests spanned the fields of optical device technology, high-speed
optical communications, WDM optical networks, and next generation Internet
networks. In may 1997 he became the technical coordinator of the research consortium
named CoRiTeL. Since 1999 he has been the manager of the Research & Innovation
Unit. He holds six patents relating to optical networks and traffic engineering solutions,
is co-author of a book on high-speed optical communications, and author or co-author
of more than 100 papers published in either international scientific/technical journals or
international conferences. He has been lecturer (professore a contratto) at the University
of Rome Tor Vergata, at the Polytechnic of Bari, and adjunct professor of Design of
telecommunications equipments at the University of Rome La Sapienza. He is senior
member of the IEEE, and member of the editorial board of the journal Photonic
Network Communications, (New York: Kluwer Academic). For the same journal he has
operated twice as guest editor for special issues on WDM transport networks and on
routing and failure restoration strategies in optical networks. He was also guest editor of
a special issue on optical networks for the journal of Computer Networks, (Elsevier). He
has been guest editor twice for IEEE Magazines, respectively for the special issue
Optical Networking Solutions for Next Generation Internet Networks, published on
IEEE Communication Magazine, and for the special issue Traffic Engineering in
Optical Networks, published on IEEE Network. Recently, he guest edited the special
issue Traffic Engineering for Multi-Layer Networks, which will appear on the IEEE
Journal of Selected Areas in Communications. He was the Chairman of the conference
NGI 2005, supported by the IEEE Communications Society and the IFIP, and organized
on behalf of the European Network of Excellence EURO-NGI.

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