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GCN Home > 06/07/05 web stories

Carriers cooperate to create global interoperability test bed

By William Jackson, GCN Staff

CHICAGO—An international consortium of telecom carriers is hosting the second Worldwide Interoperability Demonstration, a 10-week test of intelligent optical networking standards culminating at the SuperComm trade show this week.

The demonstration, organized by the Optical Internetworking Forum, tests support for Ethernet services over multidomain SONET/SDH transport networks in the United States, China and Europe, said Jim Jones, network architect for Alcatel Corp. of Calabasas, Calif.

“Ethernet is proven and mature,” said Jones, who also chairs the OIF technical committee. “What is lacking is an established wide-area-networking connectivity. The attraction for carriers is the widespread use of Ethernet connections.”

The carrier hosts are providing test facilities, engineering staff and real-world network connections for the demonstration, which began in mid-April. Devices being tested include routers, multiservice provisioning platforms, SONET\SDH cross-connects, optical switches, optical add-drop multiplexers and reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexers.

Products used in the demonstration employ OIF implementation agreements intended to allow interoperability in a multicarrier, multivendor environment.

Last year’s demonstration addressed signaling of SONET/SDH connections from network edge to network edge. Connections were set up on one carrier’s network, carried through a second carrier’s and terminated on a third network.

This year’s event demonstrates client-to-client signaling. This enables Ethernet clients to signal for dynamic connections across the SONET/SDH network without requiring the client to be aware of the underlying server layer network.

The interoperability control plane technologies being demonstrated let switches signal for services across networks. Unlike the traditional centralized connection setup process, intelligence is being distributed to network devices to automate the setup process.

Client-to-client signaling requires network elements on the edge to be able to see the client side Ethernet layer and the SONET/SDH layer in the network.

“It is quite a challenge to perform that edge function and have visibility into both layers,” Jones said.

Testing the implementation agreements for existing standards in a real-world environment is essential, Jones said. The standards are mature. “What isn’t mature is multivendor and multicarrier interoperability.”

Standards do not always reflect real-world conditions and do not by themselves ensure interoperability. Demonstrations provide feedback, helping to identify ambiguities and weaknesses.

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