Juniper Networks' Cloud Metro Networks Enable Next-Generation 5G, Edge and IoT Services

Juniper Networks recently unveiled a new vision for the future of metro networks: the Cloud Metro Network. By reimagining the metro network, operators can begin to address the most pressing business and technology challenges and reshape their role in the digital ecosystem.

Why Cloud Metro Networks Matter The accelerating development of 5G, IoT, and edge services presents incredible opportunities for network operators to benefit from growing digitization and a host of new challenges. These new distributed applications are gradually shifting service delivery from the traditional provider edge to the metro network, facilitating the delivery of more services, at higher speeds, and with a greater variety of traffic within the metro network. Suddenly, a new generation of 5G, Internet of Things (IoT) and distributed edge services are possible. And large service providers and enterprise networks are the engines driving it all.
Before we do that, we first need to think differently about a long-neglected part of the network: the metro network. By “metro,” we mean that critical part of today's infrastructure that handles access and aggregation, where everything that accesses the network comes together. In order to enhance the digital experience of the future, we must rethink our fundamental concepts of how the MAN is structured, how we operate it, and even what it is used for.

Over the next few years, metro traffic will grow up to four times faster than other locations in the network - and much of it will stay on the metro network, providing distributed edge services. The lines between different parts of the network and services (commercial, residential, mobile xHaul) will blur. And new distributed 5G and edge services will push nearly a third of workloads to the edge cloud. Traditional metro networks, which carry traffic back and forth through a centralized core, are not up to the task. To capitalize on the new 5G and edge opportunities, network operators need to build networks around experience-driven outcomes, not around connectivity. They need cloud MANs.
Juniper Networks' Cloud MAN vision reinvents today's siloed point-to-point MANs into a single, multi-functional IP service switching matrix. Our vision is built on the experience of cloud-scale operators managing large-scale networks at scale through automated operations and maintenance. Today, we have transformed our design concepts so that we can meet the networking needs of next-generation metro networks. Unlike today's fragmented architectures, the Cloud MAN is built for resource pooling, network slicing, and automated cloud operations and maintenance. It interfaces with physical and virtual network functions to deliver distributed services closer to the end user. It intelligently distributes user-plane functions and service edges where they are needed to dramatically improve efficiency and quality. In addition, it utilizes a cloud-like architecture to bring the agility and resiliency of the cloud to the metro network.

The coming era of 5G, IoT and the cloud presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for organizations across a wide range of industries, as well as a daunting set of new challenges. Many of these challenges can only be addressed by carriers and their transformed networks. However, network operators will not be able to meet these challenges if they rely only on the metro networks of the past, which were designed for static transport and aggregation needs.
With cloud MANs, network operators can reduce the cost and complexity of today's siloed MAN architectures and operations and maintenance. More importantly, they can add unique value to the exciting new 5G and edge applications. They can be the sole player in the digital ecosystem, bringing cloud resources and smart technologies closer to the end user while delivering the low latency, timeliness and guaranteed performance that make the next generation of digital experiences possible.