Creating an intelligent optical network worldwide interoperability demonstration

The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) conducted a world interoperability demonstration in conjunction with SUPERCOMM held in Chicago June 22-24, 2004. The demonstration was executed on a global stage with seven carriers across three continents internetworking through an intelligent control plane in a multivendor environment of 15 vendor participants. OIF's demonstration successfully included dynamic end-to-end connection management between client devices and transport network elements in a multidomain, multinode environment. The global connectivity included network elements (NEs) that incorporated the OIF optical user-to-network interface (UNI) and external network-to-network interfaces (E-NNI) among various vendors. Furthermore, carriers were able to test the new Ethernet over synchronous optical network/synchronous digital hierarchy (SONET/SDH) capabilities utilizing the generic framing procedure (GFP-F), virtual concatenation (VCAT), and the link capacity adjustment scheme (LCAS), based on International Telecommunication Union - Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) recommendations. This article described the technical approach and execution of this demonstration.