Network reliability and resiliency in next generation networks at physical, datalink, and network layers

Abstract

The "Next Generation Network"(NGN) will replace today's separate networks for telephone and data. It is expected that the NGN will allow the introduction of new services, such as broadcast media transmission and video on demand. A major consideration with the NGN is that it provides an equivalent voice service quality and resiliency as the current telephone network. The analysis carried out for this thesis looked at the physical reliability of the network topology, network resiliency of the most popular candidate protocols at datalink and network layers, and the end-to-end voice performance over an NGN corresponding to the New Zealand network. This showed that the physical layer reliability of the network could surpass the reliability of the telephone network. The results also showed that in a representative ladder-based core network Multi Protocol Label Switching has a much better resiliency than Open Shortest Path First. In a representative tree-based access topology MPLS was found to be superior to Ethernet. The analysis of an end-to-end voice solution over the NGN yielded results which showed that the network complies with the most strict standards and the voice is of current telephone quality provided that packet losses in the NGN are below 1.34 %, which is relatively high to the expected NGN packet loss figures.