Re-architecting Broadband Networks - Cisco Blogs

That is Half II of a three-blog collection on options to beat challenges related to bridging the digital divide.

Within the earlier weblog (see Bridging the Digital Divide with Subscriber Edge), we mentioned the normal broadband community design. On this weblog, we are going to deal with a brand new structure for broadband networks, and the challenges that they deal with.

Shifting to a distributed structure

The power to allow subscriber features on completely different layers or gadgets within the community supplies a possibility to optimally place subscriber edge within the community to assist match economical and user-experience wants. For instance, provided that video quantities to greater than 75% of the quantity of whole subscriber visitors, versatile termination permits for the environment friendly offload of video visitors nearer to the subscriber via cautious placement of content material caches and the addition of peering factors. Distributed termination of subscribers improves the general person expertise because the visitors follows a extra ideally suited path that optimizes capability utilization and helps decrease latency for demanding purposes.

With this distributed structure, communication service suppliers (CSPs) can save prices by lowering unneeded bandwidth upgrades of your complete community via visitors offload additional downstream. Nevertheless, with extra distributed placement of subscriber edge features utilizing completely different termination fashions, CSPs could face challenges with scaling, managing, and working subscriber companies networks.

To resolve these challenges, Broadband Discussion board outlined the Management and Person Aircraft Separation (CUPS) mannequin for the Broadband Community Gateway (BNG) in TR-459 (see Determine 1). CUPS permits distribution of person/knowledge planes nearer to the subscriber, permitting the management airplane operate to be centralized. It is a vital change from the normal BNG structure—the place management airplane and person airplane features are tightly built-in and carried out by the identical gadget. This new distributed architectural method takes benefit of CUPS to supply newer broadband companies and use instances which might be completely different from conventional choices.

Centralizing the management airplane operate helps decrease operational prices in a distributed subscriber edge operate that may be non-uniform with various necessities on scalability, type issue, and position.

CUPS additionally permits new income streams or fashions, which weren’t attainable with the normal structure, similar to differentiated service plans. For instance, service suppliers can supply a day/night time plan, the place subscribers are provisioned or moved to a smaller set of person planes in the course of the night time for price financial savings and potential sustainability advantages.

Clients may supply tiered plans with Platinum, Gold, and Finest-Effort, based mostly on redundancy capabilities to assist defend premium subscribers from person airplane, entry, or website failures. With the management airplane not tightly built-in with the person airplane, and full visibility of all person planes, CUPS permits greater flexibility for CSPs to seamlessly transfer subscribers to completely different nodes with out disruption.

**Determine 1. New CUPS structure view**

The newest growth by the Broadband Discussion board is Subject 2 of TR-459 Multi-Service Disaggregated BNG with CUPS specification (see Figure2), which permits improved resiliency, scalability, and quicker deployment instances to assist present a greater end-user expertise with a extra dependable and constant service.

**Determine 2. MS-BNG features separating into management airplane and person airplane (from BBF TR-459i2)**

Within the third weblog, we are going to share particulars on the Cisco Subscriber Edge resolution, together with the structure, technical benefits, and buyer advantages.