Towards a real convergence for multi-play

Broadband service delivery has experienced a great evolution due to significant technological advances, which have favored the appearance of new business models. In this context, multi-play services denote the provisioning of several broadband services over a single broadband connection. In current deployments, there are a concrete number of services available (the same for all the customers), and bandwidth is pre-allocated by each service. This paper proposes a new approach that addresses this topic in a generic way. The new architecture does not impose any restrictions and handles the multi-service delivery with independence of the number of services. The new multi-play approach makes use of carrier-grade Ethernet to achieve network convergence, which means that the same network resources are used to carry all the broadband services. Carrier-grade Ethernet is an umbrella term for a group of initiatives and standards that try to overcome the restrictions of Ethernet as carrier transport technology. Some of these standards such as provider bridges, provider backbone bridges, PBB-traffic engineering, or shortest path bridging are introduced. Finally, this paper proposes a built-in security scheme, which controls the admission to the network by preventing unauthorized users from accessing services. This approach is based on a modified version of IEEE 802.1X which permits the simultaneous establishment of multiple authentication processes, one per each service that the customer requests.