OIF proves possibilities of optical interoperability

CHICAGO--The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) set out six weeks ago to prove global interoperability in the optical control plane was possible. The demonstration put on last week at Supercomm by 15 system vendors and seven service providers proved it was.

Service providers that participated in the demonstration spanned three continents and include AT&T, China Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, KDDI R&D Laboratories, NTT Laboratories, Telecom Italia and Verizon.

“With carriers located in so many countries, it’s an around the clock event,” said Amy Wang, product line manager for Avici Systems. “And the demonstration tells us that the technology can do what it was designed to do.”

The carriers used a standards-based intelligent control plane technology to show interoperability between an Optical User-to-Network Interface (UNI) and an External Network-to-Network Interface (E-NNI) when setting up and tearing down calls on the optical path of multi-domain networks.

The vendors supplying the control plane technology include ADVA Optical Networking, Alcatel, Avici Systems, Ciena, Cisco Systems, Fujitsu, Lucent Technologies, Mahi Networks, Marconi, NEC, Nortel Networks, Siemens AG, Sycamore Networks and Turin Networks. Test equipment was provided by Agilent Technologies and Navtel.

Carriers from their home locations were able to test new Ethernet-over-Sonet/SDH service capabilities using enhanced data encapsulation. The tests included the Generic Framing Procedure (GFP), Virtual Concatenation (VCAT) and the Link Capacity Adjustment Scheme (LCAS).

Intra-lab testing for the worldwide interoperability demonstration began in mid-May in preparation for Supercomm. Testing was conducted simultaneously at carrier test facilities in China, Germany, Italy and the U.S. Testing focused on creating new service definitions such as Ethernet/GFP, intra-carrier networking strategies and global networking service models.

“It is a major step toward operationalizing this technology,” said Jim Jones, senior systems engineer at Alcatel and architect and signaling chair at the OIF

The success of the demo is expected to lead to the development of inter-carrier interoperability agreements. And with the results, carriers will be better able evaluate the operations benefit of multi-vendor end-to-end network provisioning architectures for Ethernet and optical services.