Telecommunications Essentials

Enterprise Network Trends

This chapter has mentioned some of the many trends in enterprise networks; they are summarized here. First, today there is more intelligence in the environment. We are moving to an era of ubiquitous, or pervasive, computing, which means that intelligence is being embedded into everyday objects. As these objects become intelligent, they communicate with each other, and hence they need network access points. Network intelligence is increasingly moving toward the edge, so policy management, proper QoS mapping, and aggregation of packets is increasingly occurring at the edge of the network. The current trend is for the core to become fast but dumb. However, the debate over the pros and cons of intelligence at the edge versus ...