Books of the year 2016 - Part 2

More industry figures comment on books read this year. Here are Finisar's Simon Poole's and Ciena's Loudon Blair's recommendations.

Simon Poole, director, new business ventures, Finisar Australia

The highlight of the year in fiction was reading The Shepherds’ Crown, the last of the Discworld novels from the wonderful Terry Pratchett. He, along with his cast of extraordinary characters, including the marvellous Tiffany Aching – a fabulous role model for teenage girls, held up a mirror to the foibles and strengths of our humanity, and will be sorely missed.

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Ciena brings data analytics to optical networking

• Ciena's WaveLogic Ai coherent DSP-ASIC makes real-time measurements, enabling operators to analyse and adapt their networks.     
• The DSP-ASIC supports 100-gigabit to 400-gigabit wavelengths in 50-gigabit increments. 
• The WaveLogic Ai will be used in Ciena’s systems from 2Q 2017.  

Ciena has unveiled its latest generation coherent DSP-ASIC. The device, dubbed WaveLogic Ai, follows Ciena’s WaveLogic 3 family of coherent chips which was first announced in 2012. The Ai naming scheme reflects the company's belief that its latest chipset represents a significant advancement in coherent DSP-ASIC functionality.  

Helen XenosThe WaveLogic Ai is Ciena's first DSP-ASIC to support two baud rates, 35 gigabaud for fixed-grid optical networks and 56 gigabaud for flexible-grid ones. The design also uses advanced modulation schemes to optimise the data transmission over a given link.

Perhaps the most significant development, however, is the real-time network monitoring offered by the coherent DSP-ASIC. The data will allow operators to fine-tune transmissions to adapt to changing networking conditions. 

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OIF starts work on a terabit-plus CFP8-ACO module

The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) has started a new analogue coherent optics (ACO) specification based on the CFP8 pluggable module.

The CFP8 is the latest is a series of optical modules specified by the CFP Multi-Source Agreement and will support the emerging 400 Gigabit Ethernet standard.

Karl GassAn ACO module used for optical transport integrates the optics and driver electronics while the accompanying coherent DSP-ASIC residing on the line card.

Systems vendors can thus use their own DSP-ASIC, or a merchant one if they don’t have an in-house design, while choosing the coherent optics from various module makers. The optics and the DSP-ASIC communicate via a high-speed electrical connector on the line card.

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Ciena enhances its 6500 packet-optical transport family

Ciena has upgraded its 6500 family of packet-optical transport platforms with the T-series that supports higher-capacity electrical and optical switching and higher-speed line cards.

"The 6500 T-Series is a big deal as Ciena can offer two different systems depending on what the customer is looking for," says Andrew Schmitt, founder and principal analyst of market research firm, Cignal AI.

Helen XenosIf customers want straightforward transport and the ability to reach a number of different distances, there is the existing 6500 S-series, says Schmitt. The T-series is a system specifically for metro-regional networks that can accommodate multiple traffic types – OTN or packet.

"It has very high density for a packet-optical system and offers pay-as-you-grow with CFP2-ACO [coherent pluggable] modules," says Schmitt.

Ciena says the T-series has been developed to address new connectivity requirements service providers face. Content is being shifted to the metro to improve the quality of experience for end users and reduce capacity on backbone networks. Such user consumption of content is one factor accounting for the strong annual 40 percent growth in metro traffic.

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Ciena shops for photonic technology for line-side edge

Briefing: DWDM developments

Part 3: Acquisitions and silicon photonics

Ciena is to acquire the high-speed photonics components division of Teraxion for $32 million. The deal includes 35 employees and Teraxion’s indium phosphide and silicon photonics technologies. The systems vendor is making the acquisition to benefit its coherent-based packet-optical transmission systems in metro and long-haul networks.

Sterling Perrin

“Historically Ciena has been a step ahead of others in introducing new coherent capabilities to the market,” says Ron Kline, principal analyst, intelligent networks at market research company, Ovum. “The technology is critical to own if they want to maintain their edge.”

“Bringing in-house not everything, just piece parts, are becoming differentiators,” says Sterling Perrin, senior analyst at Heavy Reading.    

Ciena designs its own WaveLogic coherent DSP-ASICs but buys its optical components. Having its own photonics design team with expertise in indium-phosphide and silicon photonics will allow Ciena to develop complete line-side systems, optimising the photonics and electronics to benefit system performance.

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Ciena's stackable platform for data centre interconnect

Ciena is the latest system vendor to unveil its optical transport platform for the burgeoning data centre interconnect market. Data centre operators require scalable platforms that can carry significant amounts of traffic to link sites over metro and long-haul distances, and are power efficient. 

The Waveserver stackable interconnect system delivers 800 Gig traffic throughput in a 1 rack unit (1RU) form factor. The throughput comprises 400 Gigabit of client-side interfaces and 400 Gigabit coherent dense WDM transport. 

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Heading off the capacity crunch

Feature - Part 1: Capacity limits and remedies

Improving optical transmission capacity to keep pace with the growth in IP traffic is getting trickier. 

Engineers are being taxed in the design decisions they must make to support a growing list of speeds and data modulation schemes. There is also a fissure emerging in the equipment and components needed to address the diverging needs of long-haul and metro networks. As a result, far greater flexibility is needed, with designers looking to elastic or flexible optical networking where data rates and reach can be adapted as required.

Figure 1: The green line is the non-linear Shannon limit, above which transmission is not possible. The chart shows how more bits can be sent in a 50 GHz channel as the optical signal to noise ratio (OSNR) is increased. The blue dots closest to the green line represent the performance of the WaveLogic 3, Ciena's latest DSP-ASIC family. Source: Ciena.

But perhaps the biggest challenge is only just looming. Because optical networking engineers have been so successful in squeezing information down a fibre, their scope to send additional data in future is diminishing. Simply put, it is becoming harder to put more information on the fibre as the Shannon limit, as defined by information theory, is approached.

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