The Optical Internetworking Forum announced that seven global carriers have begun a three-month interoperability test of data and control plan technologies. The test, which is hosted by China Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom Group, KDDI R&D Labs, NTT, Telecom Italia and Verizon, is tackling transport technologies, including OTN, PBB-TE, T-MPLS/MPLS-TP and SONET/SDH as well as multidomain service restoration.
The 2009 event, “Worldwide Interoperability Demonstration 2009-Enabling Broadband On-Demand Services,” is the fourth OIF demo and builds on the previous ones held in 2004, 2005 and 2007, said OIF Vice President of Marketing Jim Jones, senior engineer for the optical networks division at Alcatel-Lucent.
In particular, he said the 2007 event tested Ethernet Private Line over SONET/SDH control and data planes. The 2009 test looks at Ethernet Virtual Private Line, which is more complex because EVPL is packet aware while EPL is not, Jones said. This requires the control plane to understand how individual customer flows are mapped within the Ethernet signal, and controls the transport resources to meet these service needs.
While EVPL exists today, Jones said it’s primarily deployed natively. So, OIF’s test is delivering it over many technologies and doing so via a control plane.
In addition, the test will branch into various bearer layers, e.g. testing EVPL over T-MPLS, PBB-TE and OTN.
The demo also will look at control plane restoration and increasing the scale and scope over which restorations can be done, Jones said, meaning expanding them beyond the single-vendor proprietary methods used today. He explained that control plane restoration is key to supporting mesh network topologies without having to 100 percent redundancy to support expected SLAs.
By linking carrier sites in a global test network, the demo makes use of OIF’s control plane mechanisms, namely the User Network Interface (UNI) 2.0 and the External Network-to-Network Interface (E-NNI) 2.0 signaling implementation agreements. The E-NNI 2.0 IA, approved by OIF members this month, enables carriers to deliver services over legacy or emerging network technologies and is the service activation interface that allows these diverse network domains to interwork.
The demo started in early March with the equipment placed in the carrier labs. Initial intracarrier lab testing has been done and the test now is moving to the multicarrier environment. It was set to conclude in June originally, with results to be presented at SUPERCOMM, which was rescheduled for October. OIF plans to stick with the original timeline and is researching other venues to present its findings, Jones said.
Papers based on the event will be presented in July at the OIF’s quarterly meeting.
