ASON / GMPLS for OTN switching platforms

The Optical Transport Network (OTN) as defined by the ITU-T G.709 is a flexible way of carrying and now switching different types of digital signal across an optical core using Optical Data Unit (ODUs) and/or Optical Channels (Och) Multiplexing. To each optical channel that carries distinct digital client signals through these optical pipes, OTN provides the functions of transport, multiplexing, routing, management, supervision and survivability. These OTN technologies that have been successful to handle large transport pipes in point-to-point connections are now much more successful as a new switching technology. The control plane for such switching technology is all the more strategic that the OTN switching has been recently enhanced with additional hierarchical level of ODU0, ODU4 and even a flexible content ODUflex. The use of such large panel of data contents is eased by an efficient and optimal provisioning.

As an inheritance of the SONET/SDH transport technology, OTN control plane gets benefits of the education of the operation support team for opening automation in the transport network. The control plane has reused most of the concept and implementation of the SONET Control plane taking thus advantages of deployment feedback. At last, the OTN control plane got benefits of the OIF work applied to SONET on the definition of public interface for domain to domain provisioning. OIF has designed an interoperable solution to ease the provisioning through multivendor and multi domains. OIF has defined a User-to-network interface (UNI) based on a RSVP-TE signaling and an External Network-to-Network Interface (E-NNI) based on the combination of RSVP-TE signaling and OSPF-TE routing. This overlay model virtualizes the resource per domain with a routing and signaling controller that hides the internal topology per domain.

MARBEN ASON / GMPLS for OTN

Marben has built a pre-integrated offer for both an internal Network-to-Network (I-NNI) Control plane based on GMPLS and on both OIF roles, resp. UNI and E-NNI interfaces, to setup switch connections through multiple domains. This solution is based on the double instantiation on the MARBEN Controllers on both GMPLS and OIF roles.

Benefits from Marben

Modular

Modular and scalable, MARBEN GMPLS is a protocol software suite that includes MARBEN controllers combined with unmatched support of the recent IETF specifications and OIF implementation agreements of the automatic switch transport network. All the software components can be used independently to each others and can even run over a third party offer for some components such as OSPF or Path computation algorithms.

Reduce development Risk

It enables network equipment providers to reduce project risk by leveraging the stability of a product that has been extensively field tested and successfully deployed on tens of thousands of units worldwide, while at the same time taking advantage of the most comprehensive and only customer-verified implementation on the market.

Interoperability Testing

Twelve carriers and vendors, including Marben have united under the banner of the OIF to showcase multi-vendor participation in a multi-carrier environment enabling High-Speed Dynamic Services. The OIF's Networking Interoperability test showcased multi-vendor data plane and control plane interworking of systems supporting Ethernet Services over OTN in a multi-carrier environment.