The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) announced today it is starting a project that will define a “missing piece” required to effect a multivendor control plane deployment. The new External Network-Network-Interface (E-NNI) Routing project is the result of three years of interoperability work and testing by OIF vendor and service provider members.
“Without the routing protocol specified, there is a missing component that’s necessary to make the control plane useful to carriers,” said Tellabs Senior Principal Engineer Jonathan Sadler, chair of OIF’s Architecture and Signaling Working Group. “This does a good job of making the puzzle complete.”
Sadler says the E-NNI Routing project seeks to automate calculation of paths a connection should take through a network. Presently, this task is performed manually by provisioning engineers that query carrier network inventory databases. With the new protocol, the path would be identified and provisioned by the network elements, Sadler explained.
“What this does is it speeds the amount of time that’s necessary to do the path selection from hours and sometimes days to less than a second,” said Sadler, noting it also decreases the number of people required for the task. “It significantly reduces the amount of overhead in setting up connections through the network.”
Once the project is completed and ratified by the OIF membership later this year, the new specification, E-NNI 1.0 Routing Implementation Agreement (IA), will be available to service providers to use in procurement of next-generation network equipment. It also will be submitted to the IETF and ITU standards for formal standardization.
”By formalizing its routing inter-domain interface, this Implementation Agreement will fill a critical gap for carriers as they look to complete specifications of their next-generation transport networks,” said Hans-Martin Foisel of Deutsche Telekom, and OIF Forum Carrier Working Group chair and board member. “This is exactly the kind of work product that accelerates the global realization of interoperable optical networks.”
Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) www.oiforum.com
