Lightning Talk: Statistical Multiplexing

Over the past two decades, ever-increasing bandwidth demand has become an increasing challenge and opportunity for growth within the networking market. The number …

Over the past two decades, ever-increasing bandwidth demand has become an increasing challenge and opportunity for growth within the networking market. The number of Internet users has skyrocketed alongside application bandwidth intensity, and the burgeoning Internet of Things is projected to exponentially strain networks. While many hardware vendors are experimenting with spectral efficiency, those gains take time and are expensive. One key solution lies in increasing efficiencies on the transport equipment that allocate traffic. Moving away from time-division multiplexing and coupling coherent technology’s “pool of bandwidth” with statistical multiplexing allows for more control of bandwidth allocation. Statistical multiplexing can greatly increase network performance at Layer 1, arguably the simplest network layer and the easiest one to work with. Layer 2+ equipment has traditionally leveraged time-division multiplexing, a mechanism in which all packet flows — even the idle ones — fill up a channel, leading to channel inefficiencies. By allocating bandwidth for channels with data packets, statistical multiplexing intelligently combines input traffic to maximize channel efficiency. Hear how this approach applies to Layer 1 equipment, transforming networks and helping service providers and end-users optimize their own networks.