Next generation networks in need of redefinition

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 03 June 2008 06:22

Business IT - Technology

He acknowledges that such a move will overturn two decades of established practices, will not be easy and will affect all parts of the industry: including how vendors structure their organisation and the type of products they develop. It will also mean that products will become more specialised. For example carrier customers of Juniper's older T640 'core' router have been able to redeploy these to serve as edge routers as they have upgraded the core of the networks to the new T1600, but under a new architecture as envisaged by Kompella such versatility would be lost. "Our new T1600 is really a core router but it is a very effective edge and services router. That paradigm does not work with a pure transport devices," Kompella said.

Kompella acknowledges that the implementation of his ideas will be extremely disruptive to carriers. "There is struggle between th transport group that wants to hold on to what they have and the MPLS guys who are running the services."

However, he says that the benefits will be worth the pain of transition. "If you step back and say you want to build the most effective network you put one box instead of two, one control plane instead of two and one operating group instead of two."

At present this issue is simply idea in which Kompella is seeking to generate interest and support for - there is note even any information such as white papers on the Juniper web site. However he has discussed it with executives from several of Juniper's carrier customers, where he says it has been well received.

"The architecture group of one carrier I presented it to took it to the CTO and said 'this is absolutely' something we should be doing in our network,' and others did much the same thing, asking me to present to their CTOs."

He adds that some carriers are already moving in the right direction. "Several large carriers have already integrated their 'transport' and 'IP/MPLS' groups, both in network architecture and in operations. Others are doing this now, or have begun. This is the only way for networks to take a giant step forward, to become packet-centric rather than optimising for TDM circuits, to become truly 'Next Generation'."

Kompella is able to speak with some authority. He chaired the IETF's CCAMP working group where he was the author of several Internet Drafts and RFCs in the areas of CCAMP, IS-IS, L2VPN, MPLS, OSPF and traffic engineering. According to Wikipedia , he was responsible for one of the two variants of L2 VPNs, that based on the border gateway protocol (BGP). (His brother, Vach Kompella  described as an engineer with Alcatel-Lucent on Wikipedia, developed the draft specification for the other variant, label distribution protocol (LDP) based VPNs. Light Reading has a report, from 2003 , on this, friendly, high tech sibling rivalry)
The author attended the J-Tech Forum as a guest of Juniper Networks.