560 percent increase in metro network traffic by 2017

PARIS, FRANCE: A Bell Labs study released by Alcatel-Lucent indicates that data traffic on metropolitan (metro) access and aggregation networks is set to increase by 560 percent by 2017, driven by demand for video and the proliferation of data centers.

The study entitled: 'Metro network traffic growth: An architecture impact study' indicated that traffic from video services will skyrocket by as much as 720 percent and data center traffic will increase more than 440 percent during the same time period. Combined, video and data centre traffic are the key drivers to the overall forecast increase of 560 percent traffic growth in the metro.

The study showed that by 2017 more than 75 percent of that traffic will stay in metro networks, as compared to 57 percent today. In contrast, only 25 percent of data traffic will traverse the backbone. Service providers require a network architecture that will ensure that the metro remains a key contributor, rather than bottleneck, in the new virtualized environment.

The forecasted growth is expected to have a considerable impact on service providers' networks. They will need to evolve to a new type of network architecture, optimized for the cloud, that will help control costs, guarantee quality and deliver new revenue-generating services to connect users and the cloud.

To address this need, service providers must move towards a cloud-optimized network, leveraging integrated IP, optical and management solutions together with software-defined networking (SDN). This will allow them to deploy networks that meet dynamic and rapid growth in customer demand for video and other high-bandwidth cloud services with instantaneous access over the metro network.

IP Networking specialist Alcatel-Lucent offers its Cloud-Optimized Metro solution which draws upon the company's market leading IP, optical and network management portfolios to build agile, scalable and efficient metro networks for delivery of cloud optimized services.