Network Virtualization applied to the Network of a Communication Service Provider for Enabling Novel Services in Vertical Sectors

Communication technology has advanced significantly over the last decade enabling people to communicate anytime from anywhere using a multiplicity of devices. However, the power of this advancement in communication technology has hardly been leveraged in traditional services industry. Specifically, the vertical service providers, such as the Health Care industry, the Banking industry, the Education industry, and others who require network-based services to efficiently conduct their business reducing their operational expenses, and to provide novel value-added services to their customers generating additional revenue, have hardly been able to leverage the power of the network to their advantage. In the talk, I will describe several applications from the services industry that can be built on a platform (referred to as Network as a Service or NaaS platform) based on the concept of network virtualization and shows how various parties involved in providing the services are economically incentivized to make them feasible in real life.

The NaaS platform enables Communication Service Providers (CSPs) to work collaboratively with Vertical Service Providers (VSPs) to offer novel services leveraging their existing network infrastructure through the techniques of network virtualization. This solution enables CSPs to generate new revenue without additional capital expenditure, and in addition, also enables VSPs to generate additional revenue via novel value-added service offerings to their customers without incurring any capital expenditure either. Thus, this model of offering services provides a win-win value proposition to both CSPs as well as to VSPs.

NaaS Platform is being built at Infosys Technologies Limited. In course of my presentation, I'll describe a high-level architecture of the platform and discuss how various functional blocks in the architecture are used synergistically to deliver a novel service called On Demand Health Care (ODHC).

Sanjoy Paul (sanjoy_paul@infosys.com) is Associate Vice President, General Manager-Research and Head of Convergence Lab at Infosys Technologies Limited where he heads research and innovation in the field of Communications, Media and Entertainment. Prior to that, he was a Research Professor at WINLAB, Rutgers University, and Founder of RelevantAd Technologies Inc. Before that Sanjoy spent five years as the Director of Wireless Networking Research at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, and as the CTO of two start-up companies (Edgix and WhenU) based in New York. In a previous tenure at Bell Labs as a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, Sanjoy was the chief architect of Lucent's IPWorX Caching and Content Distribution product line. Sanjoy has authored a book on Multicasting, published over 100 papers in International Journals and refereed Conference Proceedings, authored over 80 US patents (28 granted, 50+ pending), and is the co-recipient of 1997 William R. Bennett award from IEEE Communications Society for the best original paper in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. He holds a Bachelor of Technology degree from IIT Kharagpur, India, an M.S and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Maryland, College Park, and an MBA from the Wharton Business School, University of Pennsylvania. Sanjoy is a Fellow of IEEE and a Member of the ACM.