Abstract
This paper is concerned with long-term (20+ years) forecasting of broadband traffic in next-generation networks. Such long-term approach requires going beyond extrapolations of past traffic data while facing high uncertainty in predicting the future developments and facing the fact that, in 20 years, the current network technologies and architectures will be obsolete. Thus, order of magnitude upper bounds of upstream and downstream traffic are deemed to be good enough to facilitate such long-term forecasting. These bounds can be obtained by evaluating the limits of human sighting and assuming that these limits will be achieved by future services or, alternatively, by considering the contents transferred by bandwidth-demanding applications such as those using embedded interactive 3D video streaming. The traffic upper bounds are a good indication of the peak values and, subsequently, also of the future network capacity demands. Furthermore, the main drivers of traffic growth including multimedia as well as non-multimedia applications are identified. New disruptive applications and services are explored that can make good use of the large bandwidth provided by next-generation networks. The results can be used to identify monetization opportunities of future services and to map potential revenues for network operators.
Highlights
Businesses are increasingly dependent on the state-of-the-art communication systems
Provided that the businesses are not restricted by the availability and capabilities of the communication infrastructure, for instance, provided that the network operators can flexibly assign and reassign the network resources to subscribers based on their current demand, the businesses can spring up and flourish anywhere, and even the sparsely populated areas are likely to attract the inward investments
The main aim of this paper is to explore evolution of broadband traffic over a 20-year perspective into the future even though the current network technologies are likely to be obsolete [41]
Summary
Businesses are increasingly dependent on the state-of-the-art communication systems. it is important that the rural as well as remote areas have the same services and capabilities as the urban areas. Traffic in future networks will be dominated by 3D video (currently, there is no 3D standard, but it is very likely that eventually such standard will be adopted), the Internet storage and other services in the cloud. The video-based applications and services are expected to be the strongest driver of the future traffic growth and even exceed the bandwidth demands of the file-sharing services. The traffic upper bounds coupled with the anticipated levels of data compression can provide good estimates of the required broadband network capacity. Cloud computing and data storage are likely to evolve to be provided partly centrally in the cloud and partly distributed at the network edges These services will affect the upstream and downstream traffic symmetry
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