Network function virtualization (NFV) has drawn significant attention from both industry and academia as an important shift in telecommunication service provisioning. By decoupling network functions (NFs) from the physical devices on which they run, NFV has the potential to lead to significant reductions in operating expenses (OPEX) and capital expenses (CAPEX) and facilitate the deployment of new services with increased agility and faster time-to-value. The NFV paradigm is still in its infancy and there is a large spectrum of opportunities for the research community to develop new architectures, systems and applications, and to evaluate alternatives and trade-offs in developing technologies for its successful deployment. In this paper, after discussing NFV and its relationship with complementary fields of software defined networking (SDN) and cloud computing, we survey the state-of-the-art in NFV, and identify promising research directions in this area. We also overview key NFV projects, standardization efforts, early implementations, use cases, and commercial products.

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Network Function Virtualization: State-of-the-Art and Research Challenges

To support bursty traffic on the Internet (and especially WWW) efficiently, optical burst switching (OBS) is proposed as a way to streamline both protocols and hardware in building the future gener...

Optical burst switching (OBS) - a new paradigm for an optical Internet

This work presents an estimation of the global electricity usage that can be ascribed to Communication Technology (CT) between 2010 and 2030. The scope is three scenarios for use and production of consumer devices, communication networks and data centers. Three different scenarios, best, expected, and worst, are set up, which include annual numbers of sold devices, data traffic and electricity intensities/efficiencies. The most significant trend, regardless of scenario, is that the proportion of use-stage electricity by consumer devices will decrease and will be transferred to the networks and data centers. Still, it seems like wireless access networks will not be the main driver for electricity use. The analysis shows that for the worst-case scenario, CT could use as much as 51% of global electricity in 2030. This will happen if not enough improvement in electricity efficiency of wireless access networks and fixed access networks/data centers is possible. However, until 2030, globally-generated renewable electricity is likely to exceed the electricity demand of all networks and data centers. Nevertheless, the present investigation suggests, for the worst-case scenario, that CT electricity usage could contribute up to 23% of the globally released greenhouse gas emissions in 2030.

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On Global Electricity Usage of Communication Technology: Trends to 2030

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, also known as HIPAA, was first delivered to congress in 1996 and consisted of just two Titles. It was designed to protect health insurance coverage for workers and their families while between jobs. It establishes standards for electronic health care transactions and addresses the issues of privacy and security when dealing with Protected Health Information (PHI). HIPAA is applicable only in the United States of America.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) is a modulation technology that has been widely adopted in many new and emerging broadband wireless and wireline communication systems. Due to its capability to transmit a high-speed data stream using multiple spectral-overlapped lower-speed subcarriers, OFDM technology offers superior advantages of high spectrum efficiency, robustness against inter-carrier and inter-symbol interference, adaptability to server channel conditions, etc. In recent years, there have been intensive studies on optical OFDM (O-OFDM) transmission technologies, and it is considered a promising technology for future ultra-high-speed optical transmission. Based on O-OFDM technology, a novel elastic optical network architecture with immense flexibility and scalability in spectrum allocation and data rate accommodation could be built to support diverse services and the rapid growth of Internet traffic in the future. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on OFDM-based elastic optical network technologies, including basic principles of OFDM, O-OFDM technologies, the architectures of OFDM-based elastic core optical networks, and related key enabling technologies. The main advantages and issues of OFDM-based elastic core optical networks that are under research are also discussed.

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A Survey on OFDM-Based Elastic Core Optical Networking

High-capacity optical transmission technologies have made possible very high data rates and a large number of wavelength channels. Further, optical network functionality has made progress from simple point-to-point WDM links to automatically switched optical networks. In the future, dynamic burst-switched and packet-switched photonic networks may be expected. This paper describes a novel architecture of transparent WDM metropolitan area network (MAN) that is capable of switching on both packet-by-packet and burst-by-burst basis, thereby having the potential to achieve high throughput efficiency. The optically transparent MAN also includes a large part of the access network infrastructure. It is scalable, flexible, easy upgradeable and able to support heterogeneous network traffic. Some results of a preliminarly study on network performance are shown.

Optically transparent integrated metro-access network

In this paper, photonic technologies for the realization of high-capacity optical time-division multiplexed (OTDM) local and metropolitan area networks (LANs and MANs) are addressed including all-optical techniques such as ultra short pulse generation, all-optical clock recovery, optical multiplexing/demultiplexing, and optical packet compression/decompression Furthermore, the new trends in high-speed electronics, data processing and optical interconnects are analyzed enabling the avoidance of the electronic processing bottleneck By the use of both, high-speed electronics for implementing functions of higher complexity with higher level of parallelism and all-optical techniques for the realization of simple ultra fast (> 40 Gbit/s) medium access functions, a hybrid medium access node capable of handling high data rates can be designed

An Overview on Technologies for Access Nodes in Ultra-Fast OTDM Photonic Networks

This paper presents a technique to transmit large optical bursts over several wavelength channels in a parallel manner, which we refer to as optical burst switching with channel bonding (OBS-CB). It uses switching in the time domain only, while the wavelength domain is used to increase the transport rate, and thus to decrease the time required for transmission of a data burst. Different structures of the transceiver unit for edge nodes as well as methods for burst assembly and transmission are proposed and discussed. Three architectures of core nodes are described and studied with respect of their cascadability. The most important system parameters and limitations are discussed.

Optical burst-switched WDM networks with channel bonding

The deployment of Quantum Key Distribution forces the development of QKD-links to be operated in current and next-generation photonic metro-access networks. These highly heterogeneous architectures determine the conditions QKD-links need to be optimized for.

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Integration of Quantum Key Distribution in Metropolitan Area Networks

A large amount of traffic in core networks is highly aggregated and core nodes are interconnected by high-capacity links. Thus, most of the traffic demands in the core area can be accommodated by providing more or less static connections between ingress and egress nodes. In this paper, we describe and study three particular realizations of static optical core networks and compare them with the dynamic, packet switched architecture based on wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) transmission and conventional electronic packet routers. We introduce an analytical model for estimating the average number of required switch ports for different network topologies in order to assess both scalability and power consumption of the considered network concepts. The results show that the concept of a static optically transparent core network promises high energy efficiency, and scalability to several tens of nodes.

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Slavisa Aleksic

Papers

Optically transparent integrated metro-access network

An Overview on Technologies for Access Nodes in Ultra-Fast OTDM Photonic Networks

Optical burst-switched WDM networks with channel bonding

Integration of Quantum Key Distribution in Metropolitan Area Networks

Scalability and power consumption of static optical core networks