GMPLS á la carte
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Service providers have tended to adopt GMPLS in a series of discrete steps, as shown in this chart. Migrating from left to right brings incremental OpEx savings, while giving the service provider time to integrate the ESI function into existing operational procedures.
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Automated Inventory Management
As new nodes, or new line cards are added to the network, ESI will automatically discover them, and report them to the inventory control function within the network management system. Manual inventory management is expensive, error prone, and increases the time before a service provider can start to bill a new customer.
Automated Topology Discovery
As nodes are connected to each other, ESI in an Infinera network ensures that they will automatically discover both internal connection within the node, and connection to each other. PIC economics means that capacity becomes available in 100Gbit/s chunks. These wavelengths are constantly monitored for power levels and bit error rates thanks to the digital nature of the system.
Point and Click Service Provisioning
Now that working capacity exists between network nodes, operators can use ESI to provision services quickly and efficiently. This is a well loved feature from SONET/SDH days that was lost with the advent of the all-optical network.
Flexible Service Restoration
For protected wavelength services, service providers tend to prefer conventional SONET/SDH "50ms" protection. But most wavelengths that carry IP services are unprotected. By using the rapid restoration function that ESI provides, service providers can slash their Mean Time to Repair an unprotected wavelength from hours to seconds without resorting to dedicated protection capacity.
IP-Optical Integration via the Optical UNI
The ASON/GMPLS architecture includes the notion of the unification of the IP and optical transmission worlds. While this has not been widely adopted by service providers to date, it does represent the most logical architecture for tomorrow's optical networks.
© 2008 Infinera Corporation.