Decoupling Resource Ownership From Service Provisioning to Enable Ephemeral Converged Networks (ECNs)

The evolution of wireless and optical networks will involve not only the adoption of new technologies but also massive changes in how network resources are owned and managed. In this paper, we describe current trends in decoupling resource ownership from service provisioning, which can be observed in both wireless and optical networks. Moreover, we present our vision of how these trends will evolve towards virtualized on-demand service-oriented networks that can be created by combining shared network resources. This type of network lasts for the time connectivity, to deliver services, is needed, then releases the resources when and where they are not no longer needed. Keywords—converged networks, optical/wireless, virtualized networks, resource sharing, network intelligence, resource allocation, dynamic composition