Abstracts of Magazine FUJITSU 2012-11 (VOL. 63, NO. 6)

Special Issue: Network

• Evolution of Infrastructure Networks to Cope with Changes in and Diversification of Social Activities

Communication networks have been making great contributions as basic infrastructure for human social activities over the years. With much effort, technological innovation has also been achieved to connect users who have demanded various kinds of services to create new lifestyles, as well. Communication networks now have a social mission to reliably connect people, since smartphones and cloud services that use data centers have been widely deployed in society. This paper sets out a number of issues facing networks, which will play an increasingly important role as a social infrastructure with today's changes in the qualitative and quantitative aspects of communication, and the services that use them. It also describes Fujitsu's efforts for new technologies to solve those issues and gives specific examples. It then tries to explore how infrastructure networks will evolve and the technological innovation required for them.

• Visualization Technology for Flow-based Networks and Communication Services

Just after the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011 a huge volume of communication demands was observed and it was troubled to provide communication services in a usual service quality. If the server virtualization technology is applied for the communication infrastructure and communication resources can be increased and/or decreased on demands, it will be very effective for absorbing such congestion. At the earthquake, the transport network connecting the communication resources was also widely damaged and sufficient communication paths could not be provided. If a more flexible routing, such as the flow-based routing, is introduced, it is to be possible the communication paths can be more effectively used even in such a heavily damaged situation. The flow-based routing is also effective for dynamic route change according to the communication resource increase/decrease. This paper discusses about issues on the operation of such a dynamic communication resource control and a flow-based network and Fujitsu introduces a solution for them.

• Application of Server Virtualization Technology for Communication Services

Just after the Great East Japan Earthquake, a huge volume of mobile traffic was generated, approximately 50 to 60 times the usual amount. The communication network was heavily congested and many people had trouble confirming the safety of their friends and relations. Meanwhile, server virtualization technology is advancing quickly. Applying this technology to communication service infrastructure could realize prioritized service resources for voice, mail and emergency message boards. And these could be increased on demand by reducing non-prioritized ones, such as those for motion picture distribution, with less impact on service cost. This paper reports a Fujitsu study on server virtualization infrastructure for communication services.

• Network Virtualization for Large-Scale Data Centers

Enterprises are turning to cloud services as a business continuity plan (BCP) for large disasters, and as a result the systems used by operators of cloud data centers (DCs) are becoming larger these days. In the case of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), as cloud DCs become much larger so it becomes more difficult to configure virtual and physical networks with the existing technologies. Virtual networks are typically configured by VLANs in DCs; however, no more than 4,094 VLANs can be constructed because of the bit length limit of VLAN ID. Therefore, there is a need to have a technology to extend this limit. Moreover, with physical networks, the inefficiency of network interfaces and the complexity of network construction by STP have been problems. This paper describes the requirements that a large-scale DC must meet and the technical problems to overcome. Moreover, it gives a comparison of and the features of technology for solving the above problems, such as technology to extend the above-mentioned number of virtual networks and construct physical networks to replace STP. This paper also covers the future trends that we expect to see in DCs.

• Network Infrastructure Technology to Support Parallelization and Multiplexing of Services

These days, competition between information and communications technology (ICT) companies is becoming increasingly intensified. Thus, they have greater needs to expand their processing capacity without impacting their existing services, after they have developed markets by making a small start on a trial basis. One important technology for meeting these needs is the parallelization of services. In addition, multiplexing technology is an essential element for building a highly reliable system. In order to meet a diverse range of customer needs in a timely manner, companies are adding or changing their services more and more frequently, and the number of users of services and number of smart devices such as smartphones is increasing rapidly. Because of these trends, there are more diverse types of packet data flowing over IP networks nowadays and the amount of this data is increasing. This paper describes the technology required to build scalable network infrastructure that is appropriate for the systems of companies and that lets them add or change services frequently. With such a scalable network infrastructure, companies can provide various types of reliable and large-capacity application services. This paper also describes Fujitsu's efforts for building a scalable network infrastructure.

• Technology behind Smart Meter Network

In recent years in Japan, the use of renewable energy and the introduction of a new electric power supply system have been discussed to cope with global warming and an exhaustion of energy resources. The electricity shortage after the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011 has focused attention on how to manage energy at peak times of demand, such as by visualizing power consumption in real time. A smart grid is expected to be the solution. And early introduction of smart meters that will form the end point of the smart grid for consumers has come to be desired. A smart grid is a new electric power network and is considered to be an important piece of future social infrastructure. In this paper, we focus on the last one-mile network of the smart grid and describe how technology is developing to realize a suitable network that can be used to collect meter data, switch power supplies on and off, and visualize power consumption.

• Network Technology Required for Smart Community

Smart Community — a project to provide energy management system (EMS) services, for example by connecting devices such as home appliances, energy equipment and sensors in buildings and houses in a community to a network — is attracting attention. But there are two main issues with connecting these many kinds of devices to a network. The first is that many kinds of communication protocol standards exist at the same time, and they differ depending on the devices, which makes it difficult to connect devices to a network inside buildings. The second is that there is no communication protocol standard suitable for transferring the data on the devices to a WAN, because they have been controlled just from inside the building not from the cloud. To solve the above issues, we developed a function that can normalize the different communication protocol standards that apply to devices, and a gateway that can relay device data between a LAN and WAN. These functions help developers to implement applications since a simple interface is provided so that developers do not require knowledge specific to the devices. We have installed these functions in Smart Sensing Platform (SSPF) and confirmed its effect of making service development easier and shorter in a demonstration experiment using home energy management systems (HEMS).

• Service Platform Technology to Accelerate Utilization of Network-Ready Devices

Network-ready devices such as home appliances, audio-visual equipment, energy equipment, and healthcare equipment are being connected to the Internet. Although services for monitoring or controlling such devices with a smartphone are available now, sophisticated services will be provided in the near future and they will utilize various kinds of devices. Network-ready devices vary greatly in terms of their interfaces and functionality depending on the model or manufacturer, and their functions are frequently updated. Therefore, it is not easy to develop services with such devices and it is important to overcome their differences. We have developed service platform technologies that can model any device as a virtual device having common properties, and provide APIs that are common to all the virtualized devices. These technologies let developers control any device by controlling the virtualized one via APIs, and so the developers can efficiently create services without needing to be concerned about device-dependent features. These technologies have been applied to Smart Sensing Platform (SSPF).

• Technological Trends in Mobile Access Systems

The amount of mobile data traffic is more than doubling each year because of the increase in mobile video traffic and spread of smartphones. We have to develop effective technologies to cope with this continuously growing amount of mobile data traffic. The Long Term Evolution (LTE) service, which offers higher speed and greater capacity than the 3G system, launched a commercial service in Japan and other countries to deal with the growing mobile data traffic. This paper describes the technological trends in the LTE mobile access system, and introduces an LTE macro base station (eNode B equipment) and LTE Femto base station that are under development. It also describes the technological trends in an LTE-Advanced mobile access system which is an enhanced version of LTE and which is expected to be put to practical use in the near future after 2014.

• Optical Access Technology for High-speed Broadband Services

Recently, Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH) to support high-speed broadband services has been spreading widely and the number of FTTH contracts has passed 20 million in Japan. There are high expectations that optical access networks will become even faster and handle larger amounts of data so that they can be used for services that deliver high-resolution images, for peer-to-peer (P to P) services, and to offer off-road support for mobile services that are becoming increasingly faster. It is also hoped that these networks will serve as infrastructure to help cope with the improving quality of various services and help provide new cloud services. We have been providing a mass production-based GE-PON product supporting this popular FTTH and developed the 10G-EPON system, which applied ASICs of the main PON processing functions, and also an equipment power-saving mechanism based on the IEEE standard. Through this technological development, we are going to cope with demands for high-speed and large-capacity FTTH access networks. This paper describes the trends of standardization and technological development in next-generation optical access networks, and presents our approach to future work from the viewpoint of these trends and based on system development.

• Ultra-High-Speed Core Transport to Handle Rapid Growth in Traffic

There has recently been a speed up of mobile traffic, spread of optical access, and increase in speed and capacity of communication between data centers for purposes such as cloud services. This has caused a rapid increase in traffic in the core transport network and handling it is becoming an urgent challenge. Including international submarine networks, the core transport network is transitioning from 40 Gb/s to 100 Gb/s WDM. In these circumstances, Fujitsu has successfully developed digital coherent technology which is expected to dramatically improve the efficiency of wavelength usage compared to existing technology. This new technology has been applied to an optical transport system for terrestrial FLASHWAVE 9500 and submarine FLASHWAVE S660, and released as a product. This paper gives an overview of technology that is expected to help solve problems caused by the continuous increase in the amount of traffic.

• Millimeter-wave Impulse Radio Technology

With a drastic increase in the amount of network traffic in recent years, there is now greater demand for large-capacity transmission even in multi-radio systems which are infrastructure for communication transmission lines. However, with conventional multiple-radio systems it is difficult to ensure a wide frequency band and in addition equipment is required for multiple radio channels owing to the limitations of modem technology, and this means that systems consist of large devices and there is a big problem in terms of handling and economy before multiple-radio systems can be put to practical use. Hence, Fujitsu used the millimeter-waveband where it is possible to ensure a wide frequency band, and in particular the (E-band) 70–80 GHz band, which is less susceptible to attenuation caused by the atmosphere. We utilized impulse radio technology that successfully achieved 10 Gb/s radio communication in a proof of principle experiment, and developed a very compact (4 L, 4.5 kg) large-capacity transmission device (user data rate: 3.6 Gb/s). This paper introduces the features and key technology of E-band impulse radio, and the configuration and characteristics of the device we developed. It also gives some application examples.

• Automated Network Control

As cloud and mobile services continue to grow significantly, networks need to be more agile, flexible, and optimized than ever before. Today, many equipment deployed in both mobile wireless and transport networks are configured manually, and are not necessarily meeting the responsiveness and flexibility required of them. Also, there is a limit to how instantaneously infrastructure can be updated to support rapidly increasing network demand, and network optimization is needed. Under these circumstances, network control and optimization technology is becoming more important to support continuously changing cloud and mobile services. This paper introduces network control and optimization technology as well as its potential for IT interworking.

• Technology to Operate and Maintain Transport System for Handling Spikes and Variations in Traffic

The amount of global mobile data traffic has been growing rapidly in recent years. This is due, in part, to the increasing number of mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets. Such devices allow the user to access various types of image data, streamed content or anything in the cloud, and they account for much more data traffic than ever before. This tendency is also seen in Japan, where the resources that are available currently fluctuate depending on the demand of traffic, and they are forecast to be depleted especially in urban areas in the immediate future. In this paper, first we review Japan's current network technologies and examine the problems that they have. Then, we present Fujitsu's new technology which will be key to solving those problems. Next, we consider what will happen when this new technology is applied, including some new problems that will arise when operating networks. Last, we refer to Automatically Switched Optical Network (ASON), a concept that various parties are discussing with a view to making it internationally standardized, and depict future networks.

• High-availability and Low-latency Network Tap

Network operators increasingly need to monitor signals on networks so that they can monitor the service quality, measure the traffic performance, and perform billing services. In ordinary cases, a small device called a network tap is inserted in series in a communication line to monitor the signals on the line. This network tap needs to have high availability and low latency because it is inserted in series in the network. In this paper, we describe an outline of and problems with network taps, and introduce our new network tap that is being developed. It uses our own unique technology to support 1000BASE-T and enable high availability and low latency.