12 August 2003 Fremont, CA Lightwave--On the heels of a successful mid-year meeting in Ottawa, Canada, the Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) announced that it is conducting an industry-wide survey to solicit input on design practices and methodologies regarding the forum's common electrical I/O (CEI) project. One goal of the CEI project is to define the specifications for electrical signaling at rates of up to 6+ Gbits/sec and 11+ Gbits/sec over a single differential backplane connection.
"We're anxious to review the input that comes in from the CEI survey," said John D'Ambrosia, Tyco Electronics, OIF Market Awareness & Education (MA&E) committee chair. "It has always been the OIF's mission to address the ongoing needs of the end user and we encourage all potential participants, whether or not they are members of the OIF, to complete the survey."
The OIF's CEI survey is targeted at backplane designers who are interested in supporting serial data rates of 6+ Gbits/sec and 11+ Gbits/sec in their backplane application. Any designers or architects interested in completing the survey can go to: http://www.oiforum.com/public/downloads/OIF-survey.pdf.
In other news from the OIF's Ottawa meeting, Forum leaders were very happy with the record number of carriers from North America, Asia, and Europe in attendance.
"The OIF's working groups appreciate the continued support by our carrier members," said Steve Joiner, Ignis Optics, technical committee chair for the OIF. "Our technical committee uses the input from the major global carriers to keep our technical work focused and relevant to the industry."
The OIF's Physical and Link Layer Working Group initiated a new project on the interoperability of long reach and extended reach transponders and transceivers. Current optical specifications and multisource agreements do not guarantee interoperability beyond 40 km. The new project will define implementation techniques and validation tests to ensure multi-vendor compatibility. The resulting document will reduce development and deployment costs of next generation all-optical networks.
Within the Signaling Working Group substantial progress has been made on both the User Network Interface (UNI 1.0) Release 2 and the intra-carrier External Network-Network Interface (E-NNI). UNI 1.0 Release 2 reflects the latest revisions of Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) signaling protocols while preserving the functionality of UNI 1.0. The intra-carrier E-NNI specifications define signaling and routing in close alignment with International Telecommunication Union-Telecommunication (ITU-T) ASON requirements, and foundation IETF protocol requests for comments. Both specifications build upon the multi-vendor interoperability successfully demonstrated by the OIF at OFC 2003.
The OIF announced that John D'Ambrosia of Tyco Electronics was elected as the Forum's MA&E chair. Steve Joiner of Ignis Optics was re-elected as technical committee chair and Dan Spears of CIENA Communications was re-elected as technical committee vice-chair.
Launched in April of 1998, the OIF is a non-profit organization with more than 150+ international member companies, including many of the world's leading carriers and vendors. As the only industry group uniting representatives from data and optical networks, the OIF helps advance the standards and methods of optical networks. OIF's purpose is to accelerate the deployment of interoperable, cost-effective, and robust optical internetworks and their associated technologies. Optical internetworks are data networks composed of routers and data switches interconnected by optical networking elements.
With the goal of promoting worldwide compatibility of optical internetworking products, the OIF actively supports and extends the work of national and international standards bodies. Formal liaisons have been established with The ATM Forum, IEEE 802.3 HSSG, IETF, ITU-T Study Group 13, ITU-T Study Group 15, MEF, NPF, T1M1, T1X1, TMF and the XFP MSA Group.