Hi, my name is Larry Horner. I am a solutions architect with Intel's Professional Services organization. We're going to talk about the communication service provider's network, and the transformation that are underway in that network. The impetus for this transformation actually began over 10 years ago with the introduction of what is now the ubiquitous iPhone in 2007. With the introduction of that device, there was a massive increase in the network traffic that was placed onto the network. In addition, a number of applications began emerging that did not originally been perceived or anticipated. As we move forward and find out where we are today, that initial transformation has driven us to a point where we're projecting that they're going to be a massive number of devices onto the network in the next five years, by some estimates that's between 20 and 50 billion depending on who's report you might read. In addition to that, this introduces some operational complexity into the network that places constraints onto the operational effectiveness in that network. In addition, there's also the exponential increase of traffic into that network to the video on demand, or sometimes what we would consider the over the top or the through the network applications that are coming on to this. We go further and we see that the use cases really require a ubiquitous mobility. The users really don't care where they are or what network they're really connected to in many cases, they want that device to operate effectively in any of those locations. Then as I mentioned earlier, the OTT or the through the network are driving cloud services initiatives into that network. All of this combines together to place significant challenges into the communication service provider network. In 2012, a gang of them got together and developed what they called the network function virtualization effort under the IoT. We're going to talk about how that's impacting some of the work that's going on into the network, and how that transformation is thriving. So, if we step back for a second, and actually look at what we're calling the communications service provider network. Some people may use the term Telco. It's a legacy description of it, but we're going to transform away from that. What we're really talking about here then are both the wired and the wireline services that that communication service provider network provides. In this diagram, we see the dark-blue areas are really the functionality that is operated by that communication service provider collection of companies. Globally, around 360 or so of them exist. They're the ones who monetize the services that are inside those dark-blue elements of the cloud. The lighter-blue elements in this diagram would be the end-users. Whether those end-users are human beings, individually users, or consumers as we sometimes call them inside our space, or whether those are enterprises, they could be business, they could be government, they could be other types of institutions. Then in addition, you might find that their consolidation points to take place municipalities may provide WiFi access, may provide consolidation, let say from a library into the communication service provider network. Now, when we look at that network, the communication service provider network, the dark-blue sections in here, we've got ingress points or access points as we like to call them inside that network. Those can be wired, and in that case that connectivity comes in through some type of customer premises equipment or CPE. Then we're going to talk a little bit later on in some of the sections about virtualizing the CPE and the functionalities that take place there, and how that fills into this whole picture of the transformation that we spoke of. Then the other access comes in through the wireless interface. We're all familiar with a mobile network. We're all familiar with WiFi at this point. Those are all ingress points as well into this network, whether it's from a macro cell or a micro cell like a WiFi that come in then. As soon as possible really in many cases, we want to take that wireless signal and we want to put it down to some physical infrastructure like a fiber or some type of Ethernet interface to drive that back into the central locations where we can aggregate that information into data centers, sometimes those would be called next generation central offices, sometimes you'll hear that description come out in this place. Then similarly, those elements are interconnected deeper into the core network. In that core network, we can have very large collections of compute capabilities that exist inside that network and the transformation that takes place in there. In those two elements that I talked about that next generation central office or the regional office center and an inner core network, we're seeing a massive transformation going on. That we talk about under network function virtualization, or we turn that into our acronym or TLA for the three-letter acronym of NFV and SDN or software defined networking. So, if we want to think about those elements very quickly, and we'll talk more in many of the sections about it and double-click down onto those things. Network functions virtualization is about transforming the way the applications are built and deployed into that network. Software defined networking is the control aspect of it. It tells us how we stitch those things together, how we allow that interfaces to be plumbed if you will, if you think about it is how that data has to be flowing through those network elements. So, we've got the workloads themselves in NFV, and we've got the interconnect aspects of it in SDN. Sometimes we overload those, and you'll hear some authors talk about network function and software defined networking simultaneously and that's fair game. But typically, we're going to want to discriminate those out because one is the actual workload itself, and the other is the control that workload. That's at the high level. Then we have to realize it has to come into place, and it has to be operationalized. Operationalizing it is the activity of doing the management and the orchestration or the mantle layer. Then you'll see that the particular functionalities in the core of the network, one of the first ones that we're going to bump into is going to be the EPC or the evolved packet core. We put a little v in front of it because if it leads with a little v, it's the cool thing. That's the virtualized EPC. We can see how that can be distributed, and then applying these concepts of NFV and SDN into that environment. Then finally, we get into the deeper portion of the network, where the data center or the cloud may be. What I'd like to say when I show this slide is that this is only half of the picture because if you really think about how this works, if you're sitting there using your handset or something, and you're streaming a video, this shows that information going out into that data center and how it's going to touch those elements. But then there's a return path and that return path may hit another data center, and another core network, and another access network. So, if you're doing something like streaming conference call between two users, you're using one of the currently popular streaming devices for that. There's actually a similarity of it, where you don't care if we're on network A, and network B, the two users on there, you're skipping your granddaughter, or whatever it happens to be. Similarly, they've got a device it there, and that replicates or folds this model over here. So, just keep in mind that this really just shows half of the picture and many of those cases of those elements that exist inside that network.
