Data centre interconnect drives coherent

• NeoPhotonics announced at OFC a high-speed modulator and intradyne coherent receiver (ICR) that support an 800-gigabit wavelength

• It also announced limited availability of its nano integrable tunable laser assembly (nano-ITLA)  and demonstrated its pico-ITLA, an even more compact silicon photonics-based laser assembly

• The company also showcased a CFP2-DCO pluggable

NeoPhotonics unveiled several coherent optical transmission technologies at the OFC conference and exhibition held in San Diego last month.

Ferris Lipscomb“There are two [industry] thrusts going on right now: 400ZR and data centre interconnect pizza boxes going to even higher gigabits per wavelengths,” says Ferris Lipscomb, vice president of marketing at NeoPhotonics.

The 400ZR is an interoperable 400-gigabit coherent interface developed by the Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF).

Optical module makers are developing 400ZR solutions that fit within the client-side QSFP-DD and OSFP pluggable form factors, first samples of which are expected by year-end.

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Acacia eyes pluggables as it demos its AC1200 module

The emerging market opportunity for pluggable coherent modules is causing companies to change their strategies. 

Ciena is developing and plans to sell its own coherent modules. And now Acacia Communications, the coherent technology specialist, says it is considering changing its near-term coherent digital signal processor (DSP) roadmap to focus on coherent pluggables for data centre interconnect and metro applications. 

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T-API taps into the transport layer

The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) in collaboration with the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) and the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) have tested the second-generation transport application programming interface (T-API 2.0).

SK Telecom's Park Jin-hyo

T-API 2.0 is a standardised interface, released in late 2017 by the ONF, that enables the dynamic allocation of transport resources using software-defined networking (SDN) technology.

The interface has been created so that when a service provider, or one of its customers, requests a service, the required resources including the underlying transport are configured promptly.       

The OIF-led interoperability demonstration tested T-API 2.0 in dynamic use cases involving equipment from several systems vendors. Four service providers - CenturyLink, Telefonica, China Telecom and SK Telecom - provided their networking labs, located in three continents, for the testing.

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ON2020 rallies industry to address networking concerns

Peter Winzer highlights one particular slide, part of the operator-findings presentation, to explain the purpose of the Optical Networks 2020 (ON2020) group.

Source: ON2020

The slide shows how router-blade client interfaces are scaling at 40% annually compared to the 20% growth rate of general single-wavelength interfaces (see chart).

Extrapolating the trend to 2024, router blades will support 20 terabits while client interfaces will only be at one terabit. Each blade will thus require 20 one-terabit Ethernet interfaces. “That is science fiction if you go off today’s technology,” says Winzer, director of optical transmission subsystems research at Nokia Bell Labs and a member of the ON2020 steering committee.

This is where ON2020 comes in, he says, to flag up such disparities and focus industry efforts so they are addressed.

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The OIF’s 400ZR coherent interface starts to take shape

Part 2: Coherent developments

The Optical Internetworking Forum’s (OIF) group tasked with developing two styles of 400-gigabit coherent interface is now concentrating its efforts on one of the two.

When first announced last November, the 400ZR project planned to define a dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) 400-gigabit interface and a single wavelength one. Now the work is concentrating on the DWDM interface, with the single-channel interface deemed secondary. 

Karl Gass"It [the single channel] appears to be a very small percentage of what the fielded units would be,” says Karl Gass of Qorvo and the OIF Physical and Link Layer working group vice chair, optical, the group responsible for the 400ZR work.

The likelihood is that the resulting optical module will serve both applications. “Realistically, probably both [interfaces] will use a tunable laser because the goal is to have the same hardware,” says Gass.   

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OIF prepares for virtual network services

The Optical Internetworking Forum has begun specification work for virtual network services (VNS) that will enable customers of telcos to define their own networks. VNS will enable a user to define a multi-layer network (layer-1 and layer-2, for now) more flexibly than existing schemes such as virtual private networks.

Vishnu Shukla"Here, we are talking about service, and a simple way to describe it [VNS] is network slicing," says OIF president, Vishnu Shukla. "With transport SDN [software-defined networking], such value-added services become available."

The OIF work will identify what carriers and system vendors must do to implement VNS. Shukla says the OIF already has experience working across multiple networking layers, and is undertaking transport SDN work. "VNS is a really valuable extension of the transport SDN work," says Shukla.

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OIF defines carrier requirements for SDN

The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) has achieved its first milestone in defining the carrier requirements for software-defined networking (SDN).

"The orchestration layer will coordinate the data centre and transport network activities and give ... easy access to new applications"

Hans-Martin Foisel, OIF

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