17 March 2003 -- Lumentis, Stockholm, says that its optical platform has been selected by the Department of Microelectronics and Information Technology (IMIT) at Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) for its research on new routing protocols for network convergence.
The network, which includes Lumentis' all-optical cross-connects, is already installed and in use on the IMIT research network.
The research at IMIT targets the development and implementation of new protocols for managing wavelengths between separate management domains. Successfully implementing such protocols in new standards (e.g. GMPLS) will enable "carrier-free networks" where customers at the edge can easily control and route light paths across complex multi-vendor networks.
"The Lumentis equipment provided the performance and flexibility that we wanted for our research on open exchange point-centric network topologies, which we hope will empower users to design and operate the networks they need by themselves," said Bjorn Pehrson, professor of Telecommunication Systems at the Royal Institute of Technology. "Lumentis also provides development support - this is of great value for our PhD students."
"With the Mentis solution, including our advanced all-optical cross connect, IMIT has a state-of-the-art tool for their research," claims Ulf Persson, director of System and Network Design at Lumentis.
CeBIT launches
At the CeBIT 2003 exhibition Lumentis demonstrated its latest offering - the option of 10Gbit/s wavelengths in its networks via a single-board, single-slot 10Gbit/s transponder. The 10Gbit/s transponder allows operators to offer end-to-end 10Gbit/s services to customers at a competitive price level and with faster service provisioning.
Within a package measuring just 220x230x25mm resides a fully G.709-compliant transponder for 10Gbit/s SDH/SONET and 10 Gigabit Ethernet traffic. The 10Gbit/s transponder offers performance monitoring and forward error correction (FEC) capabilities.
"In a conventional network, the network design and the installed equipment must be initially prepared for a future 10Gbit/s upgrade. This drives up the both the initial investment as well as the operational expenses," said Pär Johanson, director of marketing and sales.
"One of the key differentiators of the Lumentis network solution is that 10Gbit/s services can be added to an existing Lumentis network without any initial or additional costly network preparation."
Lumentis provides a service-independent network solution with significantly enhanced metro performance without using line amplifiers. Thus, all wavelengths and bit rates can be handled individually.
As line amplification is removed as a shared device and a single point of failure, the reliability of the network is significantly increased.
When adding 10Gbit/s services, there is no need for the network to be re-tuned to ensure that all amplifiers have the correct characteristics to cope with the new services as well as to ensure that proper power balancing is maintained between all wavelengths.
If a new 10Gbit/s service requires an amplifier to bridge a distance, Lumentis can simply add a low-cost amplifier to that wavelength before and/or after it is dropped or added from the line fibre (i.e. "off-line amplification").
Lumentis argues there is no need to invest in any equipment now to enable an easy addition of 10Gbit/s services in the future. Each link becomes automatically cost-performance optimised independent of bit rate.