Agilent's OmniBER verifies design, interoperability for RPR via GFP over SONET/SDH
March 15, 2005 Anaheim, CA -- Agilent Technologies, a developer of fiber-optic testing products, has introduced a device that provides device design and interoperability verification for both IEEE 802.17 Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) and Generic Framing Procedure (GFP) for multi-service platforms (MSPs). The company says its OmniBER communications performance analyzers enable chipset designers, network equipment manufacturers, and service provider labs to verify RPR chipsets and RPR-enabled devices more quickly, accelerating service deployment.
RPR technology, which supports the transportation of triple-play voice, video, and data services over SONET and in metro networks, was standardized according to IEEE 802.17 in September 2004. The key benefits of RPR include increased bandwidth efficiency, support for class-of-service features, carrier class protection, and high scalability.
"Worldwide RPR revenue hit $323 million in 2003, and we project it to grow 200 percent to $967 million by 2007, a compound annual growth rate of 32 percent," notes Michael Howard, principal analyst of Infonetics Research. "Service providers are figuring in RPR over SONET/SDH plans much more now than they were even six months ago. In fact, 63 percent now plan to offer Ethernet services over RPR in the next few years."
The company says its OminBER analyzer is a second-generation RPR, SONET/SDH, and jitter analyzer, scalable to 40 Gbit/sec, designed to have extremely low intrinsic jitter, which the company calls a key enabler of greater measurement accuracy. The company says the analyzer provides both functional and jitter conformance testing in a single product, and that its RPR and GFP measurement capabilities allow users to thoroughly test hardware, software, and system level performance of RPR encapsulated in GFP and carried over SONET/SDH, the most common method used by MSPs.
According to the company, the analyzer with RPR integrates support for the following measurements:
* Hardware verification and interoperability verification of RPR/GFP-enabled SONET/SDH devices to ensure device compatibility and interoperability with the IEEE 802.17 RPR standard.
* Comprehensive SONET/SDH test capability, including GFP, high- and low-order virtual concatenation (VCat), Ethernet payload, and Link Capacity Adjustment Scheme (LCAS) measurement capabilities, as well as RPR, to provide insight into all protocol layers helping to identify connectivity issues.
* Advanced analysis capabilities for RPR to help ensure standards-conformance and Quality of Service, while resolving multi-vendor interoperability problems for RPR features such as fairness of class-of-service delivered.
* An encapsulation analyzer to provide deep insight into device behavior with capture and analysis of RPR signal structures down to byte level, enabling complete capture, decode, and display of RPR frames. Capture triggers provide the ability to select and analyze the exact frames of interest for detailed problem isolation.
* RPR frame extraction from SONET/SDH framed GFP (GFP-F) signals, including VCat containers, to allow designers to test operating networks in through mode and find and fix non-conformant designs under realistic operating conditions.
* Stress testing of RPR devices to ensure high reliability for a wide variety of operating and fault conditions during test.
"OmniBER's unique capability for checking compliance and interoperability of SONET/SDH MSPs to the IEEE 802.17 (RPR) standard has been eagerly awaited by our customers," asserts Dave Bass, general manager of Agilent's data networks division. "Many leading NEMs, service providers and component manufacturers who have purchased OmniBERs with NG SONET capabilities can also easily upgrade to RPR capability."
The company's J7233A (2.5 Gbit/sec capability) and J7231B (10 Gbit/sec capability) OmniBER analyzers are now available at prices starting from $86,198.