NOVEMBER 29, 2007 -- Members of the Optical Internetworking Forum (search for OIF) say they have reviewed results of its successful 2007 Worldwide Interoperability Demonstration and initiated follow-up work at their year-end meeting in Kobe, Japan earlier this month. Based on the successful demonstration of On-Demand Ethernet Services conducted this summer at ECOC 2007, the Forum's technical leadership launched an E-NNI 2.0 Routing Project to address additional routing support for multilayer UNI and E-NNI signaling.
"The OIF is quickly incorporating what we learned during the three-month interoperability testing effort this summer," reports Jonathan Sadler of Tellabs and the OIF Architecture & Signaling Working Group chair. "The OIF is continuing to develop control plane capabilities to meet carrier Ethernet service needs through our UNI 2.0 and E-NNI 2.0 implementation agreement work." (Click here for demo results.)
Attendees at the Kobe meeting participated in a joint workshop with the Photonic Internet Forum (PIF), focusing on current optical network research topics, includingI100 Gigabit Ethernet (100 GbE) and ASON/GMPLS. The workshop included presentations by PIF and OIF representatives with a keynote from Professor Ken-ichi Kitayama of Osaka University, vice-chair of PIF and chair of the PIF Technical Research Committee.
"The 100-GbE and ASON/GMPLS projects continue to be on the forefront of the work being conducted by the OIF Working Groups," notes OIF president Hans-Martin Foisel of Deutsche Telekom. "We have reached out to other forums and associations and to the overall global market to address the industry's needs."
The OIF Software Working Group launched a software interface project to support the Integrable Tunable Laser Assembly (ITLA-MSA). The creation of a Software Application Programming Interface (API) and reference software implementation at the management plane will complement the existing ITLA-MSA that has been developed by the OIF Physical and Link Layer (PLL) Working Group, say OIF representatives..
"The combined hardware/software solution is more complete and helps tunable laser vendors with shorter time to market, improved interoperability, and improved component interchange options," says Alex Conta of Transwitch and the OIF Software Working Group chair. "This software support will allow customers to multi-source among various ITLA vendors."
OIF members also approved Control Plane Logging and Auditing with Syslog, a new Implementation Agreement (IA) defining an interoperable method for logging and auditing control plane data based on the IETF Syslog documents. The IA addresses controlling and securing the generation, transport, and storage of log data to enable an auditing capability for the OIF's UNI and E-NNI. It complements previous OIF IAs on secure transmission of signaling and routing messages from one NE (or its clients, components, or proxies) to another.
Documents published
As a follow-on to the OIF's Common Electrical Interface (CEI) project, the Forum has completed studies to develop short test patterns that are representative of typical CEI data traffic. The short stress patterns provide a practical alternative to lengthy Pseudo-Random Binary Sequence (PRBS) test patterns and facilitate jitter measurement and eye analysis. OIF has published the CEI Implementation Guide with extensions to the CEI Interoperability Agreement to incorporate the results of this study.
The CEI 2.0 Implementation Guide is available for download here and the CEI Short Stress Patterns White Paper can be accessed here.
Elections
Chuck Sannipoli of IP Infusion was named vice chair of the OIF Technical Committee. Martha Fratt of AT&T was elected as chair of the Interoperability Working Group-Networking.