Business advantage is why we hear so much about various forms of connectivity network virtualization. And, increasingly, virtualization operations will be assisted by artificial intelligence, moving beyond today's applications for customer support operations.
Open networks are supposed to lead to lower costs. Virtualized networks are supposed to lead to greater agility and flexibility; the ability to create new services including self-managed or self-provisioned services.
AT&T made a big commitment to “virtualization” of its network over the past decade, essentially completing that project in 2020. Lots of mobile operators are looking at ways to virtualize their radio access networks. Verizon has done the same. It is partly an evolution of software architecture and partly a matter of network architecture.
Core network operations are shifting to “cloud native,” which essentially also is virtualized, in an effort to shift away from proprietary, closed software to open or extensible systems and more-modern use of hardware platforms and architectures, including use of hyperscale facilities instead of “owned hardware.”
In a broader sense, efforts to virtualize and go “cloud native” are the latest efforts to create more flexible, agile platforms that we can speak of as supporting “bandwidth on demand” or “feature on demand” capabilities. Automation might be another term some would use.
Separation of control plane and data plane is a foundational principle for data networks these days. Essentially, the control plane is the architecture for making routing decisions (which path to take). In traditional networking, the control plane manages the flow of packets through the network while the data plane handles packet forwarding.
With software-defined networking (SDN), the two planes are separated so that the control plane can manage the entire network, rather than just individual devices. That has implications such as allowing the separation of control logic and servers from forwarding logic and devices. -----
That allows lower-cost operations, as expensive controllers can be centralized while router nodes are dispersed and running on generic servers rather than dedicated appliances.
The data plane architecture is the way actual “bearer traffic” or end user data is forwarded from one interface to the next. Such approaches are inherently decentralized, increasingly virtualized and based on cloud computing principles.
So it is not surprising that we hear so much about connectivity provider virtualization and cloud native architectures. Software-defined networking is another term sometimes used to describe modern data communications principles.
The ability to use open radio access networks, separated base station controllers and radio sites and generic hardware (bare metal) all are related to the separation of control and data planes.
All those also are based on the fundamental “layering” of all modern software.
