Moving core services to the edge in NGNs for reducing managed infrastructure size

Telco providers are in the phase of migrating their services from PSTN to so called Next Generation Networks (NGNs) based on standard IP connectivity. This switch is expected to produce a cost degression of 50% for CAPEX, while OPEX remains fairly stable due to network management and energy costs. At the same time we are expecting a big increase of the load of a telco provider at the core level due to the istantiation of new telco services (VoIP, video conferencing etc) and to the support of third parties services (such as support to smartphone applications, etc.). The goal of this work is to show how management and energy costs can be effectively reduced by leveraging autonomic approaches to move some NGN services toward the telco network edge while still providing QoS levels comparable with those provided by a traditional fully-managed infrastructure. © 2010 IEEE.