FREMONT, Calif., June 9 -- The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) said today that fifteen companies that have been participating for the last month in preparations for its World Interoperability Demonstration. Participants and suppliers include: ADVA Optical Networking, Alcatel, Avici Systems, Ciena Corp., Cisco Systems, Fujitsu, Lucent Technologies, Mahi Networks, Marconi, NEC, Nortel Networks, Siemens AG, Sycamore Networks, Tellabs and Turin Networks.
The demonstration is hosted remotely by telecommunications carriers including: AT&T, China Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, KDDI R&D Laboratories Inc., NTT Laboratories, Telecom Italia and Verizon. The event connects these seven carriers across three continents through intelligent control plane mechanisms created by a multivendor networking environment among the fifteen participants.
The demonstration includes network elements that incorporate optical user-to-network interface (UNI) and external network-to-network interfaces (E-NNI). The UNI/E-NNI interoperability demo displays a standards-based control plane for the setup and tear-down of an optical path across multidomain networks.
"The World Interoperability Demo represents a compelling testament to both the interest that carriers are showing in UNI and E-NNI as well as the confidence that the vendors have in their implementations," said Joe Berthold, vice president of network architecture for Ciena Corp. and president of the OIF. "The success of the demonstration validates the work of the OIF in promoting carrier deployment of integrated data and optical network technologies and highlights an industry milestone in multicarrier participation and contribution in building intelligent optical networks."
Live network topology visualizations will be displayed at the OIF's booth at Supercomm 2004, to be held June 20-24 in Chicago, as service capabilities are initiated in the carrier labs by the fifteen participating OIF vendor members. Carriers are able to test new Ethernet over SONET/SDH service capabilities utilizing enhanced data encapsulation that make existing optical networks more bandwidth-efficient. These new transport network features are based on appropriate ITU-T standards for Ethernet service adaptation. The tests include the generic framing procedure (GFP), virtual concatenation (VCAT) and the link capacity adjustment scheme (LCAS).
The optical networking interoperability testing is based on OIF implementation agreements for UNI 1.0 release 2 and E-NNI and includes testing of both the control and data plane and out-of-band signaling. Both IAs comply with the ITU-T suite of recommendations on the automatically wwitched optical network (ASON).
For more information, visit: www.oiforum.com