Monitoring Division completes customer trials of multi-impairment monitoring device
SEPTEMBER 25, 2008 -- Monitoring Division Inc. (mdi) announced this week at ECOC that it has successfully completed four customer trials of its prototype multi-impairment monitoring device, the first sensor capable of simultaneously assessing critical optical impairments such as chromatic dispersion (CD) and polarization mode dispersion (PMD) on live network traffic.
mdi says it applied a crossover technology approach to measure mixed optical impairments in high-speed networks. Using pattern recognition techniques developed for genomics, the company constructed portraits of the network impairments from live traffic measurements to diagnose the impairments as they occur. mdi has created and patented this approach, which delivers measurement, monitoring, diagnosis, and optimization capabilities at low processing power with a small device footprint. These functions are the essence of what mdi defines as the new field of Live Network Health Management. The patented technology has been in incubation for four years at the company's laboratory at the Australian national information and communication technology research centre of excellence (NICTA).
mdi says it had several dozen prospects interested in testing the prototype, and the company selected four trial participants--one top-tier global carrier and three top optical systems vendors--to validate a range of practical device operations. It was key, for example, to work with a carrier that uses various commercial transponder types, as well as with OEMs with production WDM system configurations. Operations teams responsible for migrating networks from 2.5G to 10G to 40G equipment in the field have also requested prototypes, say mdi representatives.
"We have proven that the technology is real, it is resilient to manufacturing variations across the network, and it addresses practical and important problems in today's high-speed optical networks," reports mdi CEO and co-founder David Wright.
"We are delighted at how eager trial participants are to get a commercially available product from these efforts, as soon as possible," adds Olivier Jerphagnon, mdi vice president of marketing and business development. "It is analogous to the technicians' urgent need for a portable OTDR to support FTTH deployment when they started deploying FTTH. They absolutely need this solution for 40-Gbit/sec network deployment because PMD impairments are 16 times more critical at 40G than they are at 10G."
In today's scenario, network technicians and optical engineers must turn off live traffic in order to measure both CD and PMD. When the network is operating, they have insufficient visibility into impairments. It also takes too much space and is too costly for operators to deploy one monitor for each impairment, assert company representatives. mdi's prototype monitor is the first of its kind to provide a full view of the optical layer with one compact sensor under live traffic conditions in the network, they claim.
Additional impairments beyond CD and PMD will be available in the future based on customer demand.
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