On Quantitative Network Efficiency

Speakers:
Walter Chen, Sprint

For a service provider, or any enterprise with substantial network infrastructure, achieving a high network efficiency is often a noble goal or even an important KPI. While the term “network efficiency” has been used widely, for different organizations it could mean totally different objectives. In this talk, we try to define and quantify three different aspects of the so-called network efficiency and then discuss the implications and interworking between these objectives, from both organizational, financial and technical perspectives. We propose a novel approach in packet-optical networking to achieve the ultimate capacity efficiency, and also discuss the potential significant impact of recent control plane innovation such as SDN on this subject.