Inherent Network Management: Support for Traffic Engineering and CAPEX Analysis in Future Internet Scenarios

Future Internet, Inherent Network Management (INM) and business aspects such as OPEX/CAPEX are topics of vivid research activity for quite some time. This paper focuses on the combination of the three areas, showing what is expected from recent Future Internet activities based on experience in the 4WARD project founded by the European Union. We briefly introduce the notion of INM and the related de-sign spectrum. Then we evaluate the effect of INM design for more flexibility in traffic engineering and advanced monitoring to exploit bandwidth and other network resources and the impact on cost savings. We study the process of upgrading the link capacities in broadband access networks, which has to be faced by network providers in ongoing periods of rapidly growing Internet traffic. A case study of full mesh topologies is analyzed for comparison of planning processes with and without traffic path optimization. The results indicate that flexible traffic path design with INM support allows at least 20% higher resource utilization and savings in equipment costs as well as energy consumption.