OIF Begins Global Interoperability Demo for On-Demand Ethernet
By Khali Henderson
06/06/2007
xchangemag.com
Seven of the world’s largest telecommunications companies will participate in a multivendor interoperability testing of on-demand Ethernet services during the summer. The results will be presented in an Optical Internetworking Forum demonstration at the European Conference and Exhibition on Optical Communication (ECOC 2007) in Berlin in mid-September.
OIF member companies AT&T, China Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom Group, KDDI, Telecom Italia and Verizon will host participating network equipment vendors during interoperability testing June through August. Participating vendors were not announced.
The demonstration will highlight dynamic Ethernet services over multiple, control plane-enabled intelligent optical core networks, made possible by the OIF UNI (user to network interface) and E-NNI (Enhanced, or friendly, Network to Network Interface). It is the first demonstration for OIF since SUPERCOMM 2005. OIF Technical Committee Chairman Jim Jones said the two-year gap was spent maturing implementation agreements (IAs) for testing.
“What we did in 2005 was to test versions of UNI and ENNI that had initial extensions to test the multilayer aspect,” said Jones, who also is a network architect with the network and solutions architecture group at Alcatel-Lucent. “Those UNI and ENNI specs are nearing their 2.0 versions and therefore have the stability that we are looking for to test in carrier labs.”
The OIF’s UNI 2.0 IA is nearing completion with one straw ballot under its belt. A second straw ballot is likely before a principal ballot (or final vote) is held in the middle or latter half of the year. Approval of the ENNI 2.0 IA will lag the UNI 2.0 since the services defined in UNI 2.0 need to be supported in ENNI 2.0.
“We are building on [the previous test] to add some additional features for this demonstration,” Jones explained. Specifically, he said, the demo will look at “nondisruptive bandwidth modification, which means that the control plane will signal for a change in bandwidth and the connections in the network will be resized – increased or decreased – to accommodate that and it will be done in a hitless manner so that traffic is not disrupted.”
The other new feature the demo will test is “graceful recovery” from failures in the control plane or signaling network. “We are going to be deliberately injecting faults into the communications network to be sure that the data plane remains stable and that when the failure is repaired that the control plane recovers to the state it was before a failure,” said Jones. “That’s an important feature of a carrier-class operation.”
The first phase of the event, lasting about two weeks, will include testing local in carrier labs. The second phase will connect carrier labs by region. Finally, the test sites will be linked via virtual or real E-NNI connections to form a global test network topology.
The public demonstration of the test will be held during ECOC2007, Sept. 17-19. The demo will be preceded on Sept. 16 by an interop workshop. In addition, shuttle service will be provided to Deutsche Telekom labs for a more in-depth look at the tests.
“We are well integrated in ECOC,” said Hans-Martin Foisel, OIF Carrier Working Group chair and vice president. Foisel, who also is a senior project manager at DT, said the demonstration is very important to carriers like DT in providing “lessons learned and the feedback from practical experience.”
“This is one of the unique selling points of the OIF and the UNI and ENNI specifications, which basically enable heterogeneous, multidomain, multilayer networks to interoperate,” he said. “This heterogeneous environment – all carriers are facing today and most likely in the future.”
Deutsche Telekom www.telekom.de
European Conference and Exhibition on Optical Communication vde.com
Optical Internetworking Forum www.oiforum.com
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