ONE: Performance evaluation of coordinated multi-layer, multi-vendor network management eco-system

Over the years, consumer base and per-consumer demand for network bandwidth have been monotonically increasing. Network operators struggle to accommodate such demands using legacy networking philosophies, and are lately resorting to converged IP+Transport networking paradigms. Such converged networking paradigms are, however, challenging to realize, given the separate ecosystems of these two networks. This stems from the differences in technologies, management, organizational, operational and business practices of the Internet and transport networks. Such differences often result in duplication of services, thereby costing the operator. Attempts to unify these two networks have mostly been complex and disruptive. An alternative approach to address the same issue is through adaptation, i.e. abstracting every operation and transforming it to a format that is accessible for network operations across layers and vendors. On these lines, the ONE adapter, an ontology-based communication adapter, is designed to facilitate coordination between different management ecosystems. In this paper, we present results of performance evaluation of ONE in four use-cases, namely, IP link and Service Provisioning, MPLS Path Provisioning, and IP offloading. Our measured results demonstrate that the promise of ONE adapter is orders of magnitude greater than legacy networking approaches, resulting in substantial CapEx and OpEx savings for network operators.