The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) reports it held a productive second-quarter 2017 meeting in Ljubljana, Slovenia, May 9-11. Members ratified the optical Virtual Transport Network Service Implementation Agreement (IA), advanced work on the 400G-ZR project, and added Tad Hofmeister of Google to the board of directors.
As its name implies, the Virtual Transport Network Service (VTNS) IA aims to help enable such potential virtualized network services as bandwidth on demand (BoD, network as a service (NaaS), and network slicing for 5G mobile networks. The IA identifies the requirements and characteristics of various virtual network service types, such as dynamic and static behaviors. It also describes the attributes and parameters needed for these service types and the requirements for support of service recovery and OAM.
"Development of Transport SDN [software-defined networking] will enable service providers to offer new revenue generating services," said Lyndon Ong of Ciena and the OIF's Market Awareness & Education Committee Co-Chair, Networking. "VTNS is one class of services of interest to many operators and can become a main driver for the deployment of SDN in their transport networks."
Meanwhile, OIF membership pushed the 400G-ZR Interoperability project ball forward during the meeting (see "OIF launches coherent transmission projects"). The project aims to help enable 400G ZR and short-reach DWDM multivendor interoperability in applications such as cloud-scale data center interconnect (DCI). Project members received 10 technical contributions that touched on a range of topics, including power consumption of DSPs, forward error correction (FEC) proposals, and experimental demos. Project members will use conference calls to keep the momentum going ahead of the third-quarter meeting, slated for August 1-3 in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
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