April 12, 2018

White Paper: Evolving Public Safety Networks

Public Safety networks are changing and becoming more advanced in terms of applications and services that are required by its users. Networks that were initially deployed to carry low capacity voice circuits are now faced with the challenges of being increasingly adaptive, elastic and intelligent to accommodate the constantly evolving traffic it carries. These networks are going through massive transformations for new applications and critical data and while many of these networks have been around for years and have been adequately handling traffic demands, new services are pushing the demand for capacity. They are also evolving to become more organic where the characteristics of the network – performance and capabilities, are rapidly changing and becoming more stringent and intelligent. Networks that were built to sustain 45-155Mb/s of TDM/SONET/SDH traffic are now facing bottleneck situations and increased pressure to grow. The migration to packet-based networks has introduced a plethora of new challenges to customers regarding capacity planning, efficiency, reliability and cost. Additionally, these next generation networks need to scale as requirements change. Networks that once remained static for 10+ years are facing potential performance obsolescence and limitations within 3-5 years if not designed properly.

This paper describes capacity drivers for next generation networks and covers a method into effectively designing these networks to meet the capacity requirements without sacrificing reliability or increasing cost. In the first part of this white paper, we will examine each of these services and its capacity contributions and in the second part, we explore how the combination of these services affect the network backhaul design. Separately we will do an analysis of a typical network and how to dimension the network capacity to be able to adequately handle current demand as well as some factor of future growth. The analysis will cover the optimal approach to designing a network that can scale with evolution and perform organically to extend its useful life for as long as possible.