Cisco Systems' 100 Gigabit spans metro to ultra long-haul

Cisco Systems has demonstrated 100 Gigabit transmission over a 3,000km span. The coherent-based system uses a single carrier in a 50GHz channel to transmit at 100 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps). According to Cisco, no Raman amplification or signal regeneration is needed to achieve the 3,000km reach.

Feature: Beyond 100G - Part 2

"The days of a single modulation scheme on a part are probably going to come to an end in the next two to three years"

Greg Nehib, Cisco 

The 100Gbps design is also suited to metro networks. Cisco's design is compact to meet the more stringent price and power requirements of metro. The company says it can fit 42, 100Gbps transponders in its ONS 15454 Multi-service Transport Platform (MSTP), which is a 7-foot rack. "We think that is double the density of our nearest competitor today," claims Greg Nehib, product manager, marketing at Cisco Systems.

Also shown as part of the Cisco demonstration was the use of super-channels, multiple carriers that are combined to achieve 400 Gigabit or 1 Terabit signals.  

Single-carrier 100 Gigabit

Several of the first-generation 100Gbps systems from equipment makers use two carriers (each carrying 50Gbps) in a 50GHz channel, and while such equipment requires lower-speed electronics, twice as many coherent transmitters and receivers are needed overall.

Alcatel-Lucent is one vendor that has a single-carrier 50GHz system and so has Huawei. Ciena via its Nortel acquisition offers a dual-carrier 100Gbps system, as does Infinera. With Ciena's announcement of its WaveLogic 3 chipset, it is now moving to a single-carrier solution. Now Cisco is entering the market with a single-carrier system.

"When you have a single carrier, you can get upwards of 96 channels of 100Gbps in the C-band," says Nehib. "The equation here is about price, performance, density and power."

What has been done

Cisco's 100Gbps design fits on a 1RU (rack unit) card and uses the first 100Gbps coherent receiver ASIC designed by the CoreOptics team acquired by Cisco in May 2010. 

The demonstrated 3,000km reach was made using low-loss fibre. "This is to some degree a hero experiment," says Nehib. "We have achieved 3,000km with SMF ULL fibre from Corning; the LL is low loss." Normal fibre has a loss of 0.20-0.25dB/km while for ULL fibre it is in the 0.17dB/km range. 

"You can do the maths and calculate the loss we are overcoming over 3,000km. We just want to signal that we have very good performance for ultra long-haul," says Nehib, who admits that results will vary in networks, depending on the fibre.

Nehib says Cisco's coherent receiver achieves a chromatic dispersion tolerance of 70,000 ps/nm and 100ps differential group delay. Differential group delay is a non-linear effect, says Nehib, that is overcome using the DSP-ASIC. The greater the group delay tolerance, the better the distance performance.  These metrics, claims Cisco, are currently unmatched in the industry. 

The company has not said what CMOS process it is using for its ASIC design. But this is not the main issue, says Nehib: "We are trying to develop a part that is small so that it fits in many different platforms, and we can now use a single part number to go from metro performance all the way to ultra long-haul."

Another factor that impacts span performance is the number of lit channels. Cisco, in the test performed by independent test lab EANTC, the European Advanced Network Test Center, used 70 wavelengths. "With 70 channels the performance would have been very close to what we would have achieved with [a full complement of] 80 channels," says Nehib.

Super-channels

A super-channel refers to a signal made up of several wavelengths. Infinera, with its DTN-X, uses a 500Gbps super-channel, comprising five 100Gbps wavelengths. 

Using a super-channel, an operator can turn up multiple 100Gbps channels at once. If an operator wants to add a 100Gbps wavelength, a client interface is simply added to a spare 100Gbps wavelength making up the super-channel. In contrast turning up a 100Gbps wavelength in current systems usually requires several days of testing to ensure it can carry live traffic alongside existing links. 

Another benefit of super-channels is scale by turning up multiple wavelengths simultaneously. As traffic grows so does the work load on operators' engineering teams. Super-channels aid efficiency. 

"There is one other point that we hear quite often," says Nehib. "One other attraction of super-channels is overall spectral efficiency." The carriers that make up the signal can be packed more closely, expanding overall fibre capacity. 

"Just like with 10 Gig, we think at some point in the future the 100 Gig network will be depleted, especially in the largest networks, and operators will be interested in 400 Gig and Terabit interfaces," says Nehib. "If that wavelength can further benefit from advanced modulation schemes and super-channels through flex[ible] spectrum deployment then you can get more total bandwidth on the fibre and better utilisation of your amplifiers."

Cisco's 100Gbps lab demonstration also showed 400 Gigabit and 1 Terabit super-channels, part of its research work with the Politechnico di Torino. "We are going to move on to other advanced modulation techniques and deliver 400 Gigabit and Terabit interfaces in future," says Nehib. 

Existing 100Gbps systems use dual-polarisation, quadrature phase-shift keying (DP-QPSK). Using 16-QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) at the same baud rate doubles the data rate. Using 16-QAM also benefits spectral utilisation. If the more intelligent modulation format is used in a super-channel format, and the signal is fitted in the most appropriate channel spacing using flexible spectrum ROADMs, overall capacity is increased.  However, the spectral efficiency of 16-QAM comes at the expense of overall reach.

"You are able to best match the rate to the reach to the spectrum," says Nehib. "The days of a single modulation scheme on a part are probably going to come to an end in the next two to three years."

Cisco has yet to discuss the addition of a coherent transmitter DSP which through spectral shaping can bunch wavelengths. Such an approach has just been detailed by Ciena with its WaveLogic 3 and Alcatel-Lucent with its 400 Gig photonic service engine. 

For the Terabit super-channel demonstration, Cisco used 16-QAM and a flexible spectrum multiplexer. "The demo that we showed is not necessarily indicative of the part we will bring to market," says Nehib, pointing out that it is still early in the development cycle. "We are looking at the spectral efficiency of super-channels, different modulation schemes, flex-spectrum multiplexer, availability, quality, loss etc.," says Nehib. "We have not made firm technology choices yet."

Cisco's 100Gbps system is in trials with some 40 customers and can be ordered now. The product will be generally available in the near future, it says.

Further reading:

Light Reading: EANTC's independent test of Cisco's CloudVerse architecture. Part 4: Long-haul optical transport