100G Long Distance DWDM Transmission Project Defined at Meeting

With a record number of members in attendance, the Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) outlined details for its 100G long distance DWDM transmission project at the Q3 meeting in Montreal. During the joint session, carriers, along with system and component vendors, identified Dual-Polarization - Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (DP-QPSK) as a modulation technique for integrated photonic components. With a number of possible modulation techniques available to use at 100G, identifying a specific one gives the industry a starting point to design hardware and reduce development risk.

“We have selected an implementation approach supported by a critical mass of photonic component vendors and users,” said David Stauffer of IBM, and the PLL Working Group chair. “100G is an important development for the industry and network element vendors have already begun work. The goal of the project is to accelerate the adoption of 100G in long distance DWDM transmission.”

This project will specify an Implementation Agreement (IA) for Integrated Receive and Transmit photonic component(s) for Dual-Polarization - Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (DP-QPSK). The IAs will define partitioning of photonics sub-components, the electrical and the optical interface. The objective of these IAs is to create a foundation for Multi-Source Agreements for transmit and receive photonic components.

In other news from the Montreal meeting, the OIF has developed and published a guideline document for Signaling Protocol Interworking of ASON/GMPLS Network Domains. The Guideline Document is available at http://www.oiforum.com/public/documents/OIF-G-Sig-IW-01.0.pdf

"This document leverages the implementation experience of our members in recent interoperability demonstrations," said Jim Jones, Alcatel-Lucent and the vice president of marketing for the OIF. "It specifies interworking procedures for ASON and GMPLS-based signaling solutions at domain boundaries and paves the way for end-to-end service provisioning, independent of the control plane solution within each domain."