CAPEX Reduction Research Articles

Autonomic Mobile Virtual Network Operators for Future Generation Networks

The effort of telecommunications operators in 5G design and implementation is oriented to effective and efficient verticals support. Full network softwarization will deploy tools such as software-defined networks and network functions virtualization to allow dynamic service provisioning on the same physical infrastructure. However, current 5G proposed architecture still requires further enhancement to guarantee full real-time on-demand services. Current virtualization technologies still miss complete automation and adaptation, while they do not have dynamic negotiation capabilities. These issues are bounding the desired complete automation and the significant reduction in OPEX and CAPEX. Thus, this article proposes a full architecture to realize autonomic mobile virtual network operators. These autonomic virtual operators can be deployed by Internet service providers to guarantee efficient and effective network adaptation to unexpected events and real-time resource requests. The objective of an AMVNO is to exploit softwarization of networks and experiential intelligence to play the role of a local operator by performing network management and service release without human intervention. Its autonomic character can also provide proactive actions against unwanted network states.

A comprehensive evaluation of factors affecting the levelized cost of wave energy conversion projects

Abstract The primary objectives of this study are to evaluate the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) for different wave energy conversion strategies and to examine cost reduction pathways such that wave energy conversion projects are competitive, relative to alternative energy industries. The energy production of six different WEC devices was estimated for four sites along the U.S. Pacific coast. The LCOE of pilot-scale wave energy conversion projects was estimated to range between $0.07/kWh and $0.92/kWh higher than the target LCOE of those for early-market offshore wind energy projects. Device capacity factors were generally below the commonly assumed value of 30%. Methods of cost reduction to the target LCOE of $0.30/kWh were explored, including decreasing capital and operational expenditures (CAPEX and OPEX) and increasing annual energy production (AEP) through improvements in the wave energy resource and WEC and WEC array performance, and advanced controls. Results indicate that CAPEX and OPEX should be reduced by at least 45% and AEP should be increased by 200%. A reduction of CAPEX and OPEX by 75%, combined with array evaluation and control strategies capable of increasing AEP by 12%–55% could also result in LCOE for wave energy conversion projects of less than $0.30/kWh.

Approach Redefines Ideal Project Scope and Facilities Size for Field Development

This article, written by Special Publications Editor Adam Wilson, contains highlights of paper SPE 182269, “An Investigation of the Optimal Definition of Project Scope, Facilities Sizing, and Design Life for Truly Sustainable Deepwater Field Development: Technical Aspects and Economic Considerations,” by Francesco Beltrami, SPE, Energo Engineering, and Andrew Gifford, Shiladitya Basu, and Andre Berardi, Granherne, prepared for the 2016 SPE Asia Pacific Oil and Gas Conference and Exhibition, Perth, Australia, 25–27 October. The paper has not been peer reviewed. This paper investigates how decisions made through reservoir evaluation and drilling-and-completion planning affect the design of subsea production systems and, in turn, the design of production hosts. Practical alternatives are explored by challenging the current approach to project framing and definition. Rethinking the requirements of deepwater-field development will help define the proper size of the subsea and surface facilities, the optimal design life, and the possible need for staged developments. Introduction During the past 2 years, the offshore industry has looked with increasing interest, and undeniable concern, to practical and effective ways to reduce the capital expenditure (Capex) of deepwater projects. Looking at the three main components of a deepwater-field production infrastructure—host, subsea production system including export, and subsea wells—the host offers the greatest opportunity for Capex reduction. Cost reduction is achievable by optimizing the subsea production system and by adopting new technologies and practices for the construction of subsea wells, but a more relevant cost reduction is possible in principle by properly sizing the host. This, in turn, requires rethinking the way deepwater projects are sanctioned and contracts between local governments and operators are negotiated. The fact that over capacity exists in offshore hosts is well-documented. Less evident, but still convincing, is the fact that several subsea tiebacks, successfully con ducted over the past decades across the world, were possible only because a host already existed nearby that had available process or storage capacity. Sometimes, overdesigning a host may not be avoidable because of the limited time the operator has to develop and produce the offshore fields. If contracts were structured in a different way and the operators had the chance to operate the offshore field for a longer period, it might have been possible to use smaller hosts and subsea production systems, thus reducing both Capex and operational expenditure (Opex). Project Framing and Host Sizing Overview. Before a deepwater project starts its life cycle, and then periodically during the cycle, reservoir engineers and drilling-and-completion engineers study and determine the optimal way hydrocarbons can be recovered. Subsequently, wells and completions are designed to achieve this goal. The decisions made within these disciplines become part of the basis-of-design document that is the starting point for other disciplines tasked with the design of the host and the subsea production system.

QoE-Oriented Mobile Edge Service Management Leveraging SDN and NFV

5G envisages a “hyperconnected society” where trillions of diverse entities could communicate with each other anywhere and at any time, some of which will demand extremely challenging performance requirements such as submillisecond low latency. Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) concept where application computing resources are deployed at the edge of the mobile network in proximity of an end user is a promising solution to improve quality of online experience. To make MEC more flexible and cost-effective Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technologies are widely adopted. It leads to significant CAPEX and OPEX reduction with the help of a joint radio-cloud management and orchestration logic. In this paper we discuss and develop a reference architecture for the orchestration and management of the MEC ecosystem. Along with the lifecycle management flows of MEC services, indicating the interactions among the functional modules inside the Orchestrator and with external elements, QoS management with a focus on the channel state information technique is presented.

Embodied energy and cost of high temperature thermal energy storage systems for use with concentrated solar power plants

The intermittency of renewable energy systems remains one of the major hurdles preventing a large scale uptake of these technologies and concentrated solar power (CSP) systems are no different. However, CSP has the benefit of being able to store excess heat using thermal energy storage (TES). For the uptake of CSP with TES it must be demonstrated that the technology is both economically as well as environmentally feasible. This paper aims to investigate the economic and environmental impact of several TES options that are available for CSP systems. The investigated systems include an encapsulated phase change material (PCM) system, a coil-in-tank PCM system and a liquid sodium TES system. The economic impact in the current study refers to the capital cost (CAPEX) of each system including the tank, storage material, encapsulation cost (if applicable) and allowances for construction and engineering. The environmental impact of each system is accounted by calculating the embodied energy of each of the system components. Each storage system will be required to store a comparable amount of energy so that reliable conclusions can be drawn. The results from this analysis conclude that the encapsulated PCM (EPCM) and coil-in-tank system represent an embodied energy of roughly one third of the corresponding state-of-the-art two-tank molten salt system.Furthermore, the EPCM and coil-in-tank systems result in CAPEX reductions of 50% and 25% over the current state-of-the-art two-tank molten salt system. The liquid sodium system was found to result in higher embodied energy and CAPEX than any previously studied TES system. Finally, the advantages and disadvantages of each system was discussed and compared to previous literature.

Operational management of offshore energy assets

Energy assets and especially those deployed offshore are subject to a variety of harsh operational and environmental conditions which lead to deterioration of their performance and structural capacity over time. The aim of reduction of CAPEX in new installations shifts focus to operational management to monitor and assess performance of critical assets ensuring their fitness for service throughout their service life and also to provide appropriate and effective information towards requalification or other end of life scenarios, optimizing the OPEX. Over the last decades, the offshore oil & gas industry has developed and applied various approaches in operational management of assets through Structural Health and Condition Monitoring (SHM/CM) systems which can be, at a certain level, transferable to offshore renewable installations. This paper aims to highlight the key differences between offshore oil & gas and renewable energy assets from a structural integrity and reliability perspective, provide a comprehensive overview of different approaches that are available and applicable, and distinguish the benefits of such systems in the efficient operation of offshore energy assets.

Analysis of resource sharing in transparent networks

Transparent optical networking promises a cost-efficient solution for future core and metro networks because of the efficacy of switching high-granularity trunk traffic without opto-electronic conversion. Network availability is an important performance parameter for network operators, who are incorporating protection and restoration mechanisms in the network to achieve competitive advantages. This paper focuses on the reduction in Capital Expenditures (CapEx) expected from implementing sharing of backup resources in path-protected transparent networks. We dimension a nationwide network topology for different protection mechanisms using transparent and opaque architectures. We investigate the CapEx reductions obtained through protection sharing on a population of 1000 randomly generated biconnected planar topologies with 14 nodes. We show that the gain for transparent networks is heavily dependent on the offered load, with almost no relative gain for low load (no required parallel line systems). We also show that for opaque networks the CapEx reduction through protection sharing is independent of the traffic load and shows only a small dependency on the number of links in the network. The node CapEx reduction for high load (relative to the number of channels in a line system) is comparable to the CapEx reduction in opaque OTN systems. This is rather surprising as in OTN systems the number of transceivers and linecards and the size of the OTN switching matrix all decrease, while in transparent networks only the degree of the ROADM (number and size of WSSs in the node) decreases while the number of transponders remains the same.

Reducing the expenses of geo-distributed data centers with portable containerized modules

In order to maximize their profits, big IT companies need to reduce the operating expenses (OpEx) and capital expenses (CapEx) of their geo-distributed data centers. To reduce OpEx, recent studies have proposed algorithms that dynamically dispatch workload among different data center sites, to exploit the variability in local electricity price and green energy availability. However, the amount of OpEx savings achieved by workload dispatching is often limited by the local computing capacity. To reduce CapEx, data centers try to minimize the needed increases in size based on estimated workload growth. However, workload overestimation would result in a high CapEx, while underestimation would hurt business increases.In this paper, we propose ExContainer, a novel strategy that leverages portable containerized modules to minimize both OpEx and CapEx for geo-distributed data centers. With ExContainer, containers are allocated monthly to different sites and workload is dispatched hourly, to minimize total OpEx. To cut CapEx, ExContainer finds the best trade-off between the degree of capacity expansion and the number of needed new containers to handle the workload peak. We evaluate ExContainer with real-world traces. Our experimental results show that compared to state-of-the-art solutions, ExContainer allows significant reduction in both OpEx and CapEx.

Evolution of packet-optical integration in backbone and metropolitan high-speed networks: a standards perspective

Network operators are currently in the midst of a situation in which there is doubling of bandwidth requirement every two years, although the growth in revenue is nearly flat. In this situation providers must plan their networks to optimize for future growth and take into consideration flat-to-declining operating margins. The OPEX benefits of keeping the data in the lower layers of the network stack can be leveraged to plan future networks. We focus on the impact of evolving standards in the lower layers of the telecommunications stack through the contributions of the IEEE, ITU, and IETF. Specifically, we focus on the WDM, carrier Ethernet, OTN, MPLS, and MPLS-TP set of transport standards. These standards have evolved and are being adapted to meet the requirements of next generation networks and currently being considered in the standard bodies. We show through a simulation study that by adopting the packet-optical integrated standard families, providers would benefit because of CAPEX reduction and thereby enhance margins - benefiting the e-community through better services.

Balancing CapEx reduction and network stability with stable routing–virtual topology capacity adjustment (SR–VTCA)

This paper investigates the merits of the SR–VTCA (stable routing–virtual topology capacity adjustment) approach as a mechanism to find a beneficial trade-off between network stability and reduction in capital expenditures (CapEx). These are two main objectives for the entities that own the optical infrastructure, such as network operators (NOs), and those also acting as Internet service providers (ISPs). The SR–VTCA scheme is a novel approach to adapt transparent optical networks to time-varying traffic by adjusting the number of lightpaths between node pairs, while keeping the IP routing unchanged. Lightpath bundling (LB) and anycast (AS) switching are combined in SR–VTCA operation to advertise lightpath additions/removals to the IP layer as mere adjustments (increments or decrements) in the capacity, allowing to keep the IP routing stable, and thus, simplifying control plane operations. On the contrary, a fully-reconfigurable (FR) network design, where IP routing can be also modified, would increase the burden in the control plane, but at a higher CapEx reduction, since the optical infrastructure is used more efficiently. In this work, we investigate the CapEx overprovision introduced by SR–VTCA with respect to a FR scheme. In order to do this, SR–VTCA planning problem is first modeled as a MILP formulation. A heuristic procedure based on traffic domination is then proposed to solve large instances of the problem. Exhaustive experiments are conducted comparing the SR–VTCA solutions obtained by the aforementioned MILP and heuristic proposal with solutions found by other optimization methods presented in the literature to solve the FR planning problem. Finally, the results show that SR–VTCA can achieve similar results to the FR case in terms of CapEx reduction, while a huge number of IP reroutings are saved by maintaining IP stability. Thus, SR–VTCA provides an advantageous balance between CapEx overprovisioning and the control plane overhead associated with IP rerouting.

Higher OPEX enables CAPEX savings – an analysis of the cost effectiveness of the Maynilad NRW management project

This paper analyses the NRW reduction efficiency gains made by Maynilad based on NRW strategy design and constant improvement using Miya's know how and experience. These different stages of project design and budgets have been analyzed:The initial plans prepared in 2006The final business plan prepared in 2008The actual situationThe results confirm that a holistic, well designed, NRW management strategy and sufficient OPEX budgets allow CAPEX reductions and helps to reduce NRW more aggressively than initially planned.

Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System for Dynamic Load Balancing in 3GPP LTE

ANFIS is applicable in modeling of key parameters when investigating the performance and functionality of wireless networks. The need to save both capital and operational expenditure in the management of wireless networks cannot be over-emphasized. Automation of network operations is a veritable means of achieving the necessary reduction in CAPEX and OPEX. To this end, next generations networks such WiMAX and 3GPP LTE and LTE-Advanced provide support for self-optimization, self-configuration and self-healing to minimize human-to-system interaction and hence reap the attendant benefits of automation. One of the most important optimization tasks is load balancing as it affects network operation right from planning through the lifespan of the network. Several methods for load balancing have been proposed. While some of them have a very buoyant theoretical basis, they are not practically implementable at the current state of technology. Furthermore, most of the techniques proposed employ iterative algorithm, which in itself is not computationally efficient. This paper proposes the use of soft computing, precisely adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system for dynamic QoS-aware load balancing in 3GPP LTE. Three key performance indicators (i.e. number of satisfied user, virtual load and fairness distribution index) are used to adjust hysteresis task of load balancing.

A Solution to Measure the Flow Rate of Wet Gas

Traditionally the mixture of fluids at the wellhead is separated into its various phases. Proper separation and accurate measurement of each of the component phases is critical in determining production capabilities. Gas is separated from the liquid by passing the emitted well fluids through a separator. The phases are then further separated and measured independently. Using a flowmeter rather than separators to determine the gas and liquid phases gives a very significant reduction in CAPEX in the evaluation of new wells. This paper covers the key benefits that wet gas meters provide in comparison with expensive separators, multiphase metering and traditional single phase DP producing devices such as orifice plates.

CAPEX minimization through node degree reduction in a Colorless and Directionless ROADM architecture for flexible optical networks

Service Providers are constantly searching for means to reduce costs, generate new revenue streams and thus increase their competitive advantage. The migration to a Colorless and Directionless mesh architecture will enable the Service Providers to realise scalable, flexible and dynamically reconfigurable optical networks. But commodification and standardization of the underlying technologies has made it very difficult to differentiate their service offerings especially in terms of price and performance. Hence, leveraging the intelligence of efficient routing algorithms, Service Providers can notably reduce the total cost of ownership of the network. This paper presents a rationalized routing algorithm for a Colorless and Directionless mesh core optical network, which enables a significant CAPEX reduction by decreasing the number of active degrees of a node.