PHILADELPHIA – It’s tough running an advanced network when one company’s gear won’t talk to another’s.
To help get over that barrier, Comcast – North America’s largest cable operator – announced a new Open Transport Initiative, whose primary objective is to improve the interoperability between optical and IP network layers and compatibility among multiple vendors’ equipment within Comcast’s network.
Comcast will work with Nortel and Cisco as the first vendors in this initiative.
The initial phase of OTI will focus on providing operators, such as Comcast, greater network and bandwidth agility. “The OTI plans to first identify and define a set of common interfaces, which will be used to integrate and manage Nortel DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplexing) and Cisco IP equipment. Such open interfaces will help improve the vendors’ ability to interoperate seamlessly within the same transport infrastructure, making it simpler to combine Optical and IP technologies on the same network,” says the Comcast release.
"This collaboration is a natural and much-needed step in the evolution of network technology and the interoperability of multi-vendor networks," said Dave Fellows, Comcast’s chief technology officer.
"Together with Cisco and Comcast, we plan to support the broader adoption of the common interfaces that result from this initiative," added Philippe Morin, general manager, Optical Networks, Nortel. "This effort will enable the removal of operational barriers that currently exist between IP and optical networks and establish an intelligent, high bandwidth ‘service on demand’ network capable of delivering any service, over any path — optical or copper — with complete operational simplicity."
" We believe there are significant capex and opex benefits to be gained by tight integration of IP and photonic technologies in the network and are happy to work with Comcast and Nortel toward these goals,” explained Tony Bates, senior vice-president and general manager of the Carrier Core Multiservice business unit at Cisco.
Under this agreement, the parties will explore a number of objectives, including:
* Next-generation photonic line interfaces that define power levels, wavelengths, modulation schemes, Optical signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and wavelength identification.
* Align with standards compliant encapsulation mechanisms for forward error correction (FEC) and operations, administration, maintenance and provisioning (OAM&P) to allow alien International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) wavelengths to be transported across the transmission layer. (i.e., ITU-T wavelengths on service platforms directly connected to transmission layer).
* Link status interface based on industry standards (with extensions for dense wavelength division multiplexing [DWDM] transport), designed to determine the operational state and configuration on the edge of the network between an edge device and the photonic domain.
* Ethernet-based optical supervisory interface for inter-photonic domain communications.
* Distributed Optical control plane, which enables functions such as discovery, photonic routing, performance management, monitoring and adding/deleting of channels.
* Extending the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) generalized multi-protocol label switching (GMPLS) signaling and routing standard with extensions for the photonic domain – to address service activation, restoration, path viability, wavelength selection and other photonic aspects.
Comcast, Nortel and Cisco plan to promote the adoption of these defined common interfaces as open industry standards through standards bodies as appropriate and to promote broader interoperability between multiple vendor platforms within the global optical and IP industry.
