ACINO: Final report on use cases and application requirements, and preliminary techno-economic evaluation of ACINO concepts

Applications are currently aggregated in the network infrastructure and receive common treatment in the different network segments even for critical parameters like bandwidth, latency, restoration or resilience. Indeed, the IP layer provides a transport to multiple applications by aggregating their traffic onto optical connections. However, this mapping is done on the basis of the destination address, and this is coarse by nature, as the traffic is not treated according to the requirements of the application that generates it.

The ACINO concept is built on the premise that by applying multi-layer resource optimization algorithms with an application-centric approach, applications can receive a network service tailored to their requirements, while the network resources can be appropriately allocated. The value of a more direct mapping of application flows onto the network services can be significant, because it allows that the specific requirements of the application layer directly mapped onto the packet or the optical layer.

To evaluate this application-centric approach, it is necessary to have a characterization of the most relevant applications today as well as the emerging applications in the future that make valuable use of such application centric multi-layer IP-optical networks. Therefore the most dominant and demanding (in terms of service requirements) application are identified and categorized according to:

• Broadband services and cloud services, which include the current OTT, broadband access, social media and cloud services,
• Machine-based services, which include all the emerging machine-type communications related to the operation and content update of data centres as well as the IoT monitoring services,
• Advanced new services, including primarily the emerging 5G services that are envisioned today. The services are

characterized in terms of: bandwidth requirements, usage and location, latency requirements, availability (or equally protection) requirements and security requirements.

The network architecture, where the applications will be transported, is based on packet/optical networks. The packet equipment is deployed end to end in the network and optical networks are being deployed closer to the end-user to increase the network capacity. This reference architecture has also been used to identify the multi-layer network operations that the ACINO orchestrator must perform in order to configure and adapt the resources to the application requirements.

Once we have clarified the applications and the network operations, the ACINO consortium has selected some applications and relevant network operations to illustrate, with specific use cases, the value proposition of application centric IP/optical networks. There are five case studies explain in detail in this document:

1. Application-based data center interconnection,
2. Enabling dynamic 5G services,
3. Application-specific protection strategies,
4. Secure transmission as a service,
5. Dynamic virtual CDN deployment, and
6. Application-centric in-operation network planning.

The case studies are representative examples to demonstrate the value added by the ACINO concept, since they consider not only the network but also the application layer.

This deliverable also includes an overview of the reference network architecture that will be used in the planning and techno-economic studies of the project. The multi-layer network architecture is defined based on the information available for the IP and optical layer infrastructure of the Spanish national network. A reference network is extracted and describes the national backbone and regional networks. This is accompanied by the related traffic load data and predictions for future load increase. The reference network is important in ACINO for the network performance evaluation studies of the ACINO resource allocation frameworks as well as the cost evaluation studies that will follow in upcoming reports.

A network cost model is extracted by combining data from the FP7 ICT-STRONGEST project, FP7 ICT-FOX-C project and the open list price of IP and Optical equipment by Cisco. Based on cost model comparisons and studies it is concluded that the final cost model will follow the FOX-C model which will be updated with the latest technology solutions available. In order to evaluate the cost of the network, a cost evaluation module was developed in Net2Plan and is connected with the ACINO resource allocation and optimization framework developed in WP3. It is designed to be linked with excel spreadsheet in order to allow a simple and fast
update of the cost data if needed. A detailed reporting function is also included for extracting cost statistics. Preliminary cost evaluation studies have been carried out considering two application classes, one with strict latency and availability requirements and a best effort class. The results show that the added cost required for the ACINO case in order to provide application awareness is less than 5% compared to a multi-layer resource optimization case without application aware features. In addition the optimization function achieves a cost benefit in the use of network resources around 16% compared to a non-optimized solution.