Optical Networking and Converged Networks Impact and Trends in Standardisation

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Optical Networking andConverged NetworksImpact
and Trends in Standardisation

• Adrian Farrel
• adrian_at_olddog.co.uk

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Why Bother Standardising?

• Standardisation is principally for
  interoperability
• Conformance to standards can help in procurement
• Standards reduce development costs
• Standards reduce operational costs
• But
• Optical interoperability has been pretty rare
• Changing slightly with ROADMs
• Will it change with converging network
  technologies?
• Maybe OTN and flexible wavelength grids
  interworking?
• May be interesting at the optical edge

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Research and Standardisation

• Standards describe what is built and deployed
• Research has a difficult role in standardisation
• Not enough to document great ideas
• Must engage the commercial community
• Cannot take complete ideas for rubber stamp
• Must engage the standardisation community
• Research needs to be cutting edge
• May be too early for standardisation
• Optical technologies supporting converged
  networks are an interesting opening
• Many companies want to help the research
• Standards bodies are open to new ideas in this
  area

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What Standards Exist?

• Optical physical layer mainly done (thanks ITU-T)
• Optical physical interworking in hand (thanks
  OIF)
• Core optical control planes all done
• GMPLS etc. (thanks IETF)
• Core integrated network planning all done
• PCE etc. (thanks IETF)
• But
• New optical developments?
• Converged networks?

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What is Coming Next?

• For optical networks to enable converged
  networking we need a fully-functional control
  plane
• IETF about to publish GMPLS for OTN
• IETF working on GMPLS for flexible grid
• For converged networking we need operational and
  management components
• IETF working on stateful and active PCE
• IETF looking at ways to integrate PCE and SDN
  into the wider converged network ecosphere
• Interface to the Routing System (I2RS)
• Application-Based network Operation (ABNO)

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How The IETF Works

• The IETF is the standards body for the Internet
• Anyone and everyone can participate
• All work on open email lists
• Ideas are written up as Internet-Drafts
• When there is community consensus they are
  published as RFCs
• At the network and lower layers it works best
  when driven by operator demands and vendor
  implementation
• A healthy balance of academic and research input
• Dont forget the Internet Research Task Force
  (IRTF)

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IDEALIST and Standardisation

• IDEALIST is an FP7 project working on multi-layer
  networks built on flexible grid lambdas
• Physical layer standardisation is complete
• ITU-T G.694.1
• The project is helping to standardise
• GMPLS control plane for flexi-grid (IETF)
• Multi-layer planning and provisioning (IETF)
• The participation of equipment vendors and
  operators is key
• This is standardisation for a purpose
• It is not a pure research project

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• Questions?
• adrian_at_olddog.co.uk
• The IDEALIST projecthttp//www.ict-idealist.eu/