Control and management in next-generation networks: Challenges and opportunities

This article discusses the challenges and opportunities associated with a f undamental transformation of current networks toward a multiservice ubiquit ous infrastructure with a unified control and management architecture. Afte r articulating the major driving forces for network evolution, we outline t he fundamental reasons why neither the control infrastructure of the PSTN n or that of the present-day Internet is adequate to support the myriad of ne w services in next-generation networks. Although NGN will inherit heavily f rom both the Internet and the PSTN, its control and management architecture is likely to be radically different from both, and will be anchored on a c lean separation between a QoS-enabled transport/network domain and an objec t-oriented service/application domain, with a distributed processing enviro nment that glues things together and universally addresses issues of distri bution, redundancy, and concurrency control for all applications. Finally, we allude to the transition issues and show how voice-over-packet services are emerging as the bootstrap application for marshaling in the NGN archite cture.