Adrian Farrel adrian@olddog.co.uk
O LD D OG C ONSULTING

• Standardisation is principally for interoperability
• Conformance to standards can help in procurement
• Standards reduce development costs
• Standards reduce operational costs
• But
– Optical interoperability has been pretty rare
– Changing slightly with ROADMs
– Will it change with converging network technologies?
• Maybe OTN and flexible wavelength grids interworking?
• May be interesting at the optical edge
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• Standards describe what is built and deployed
• Research has a difficult role in standardisation
– Not enough to document “great ideas”
• Must engage the commercial community
– Cannot take complete ideas for “rubber stamp”
• Must engage the standardisation community
– Research needs to be cutting edge
• May be too early for standardisation
• Optical technologies supporting converged networks are an interesting opening
– Many companies want to help the research
– Standards bodies are open to new ideas in this area
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• Optical physical layer mainly done (thanks ITU-T)
• Optical physical interworking in hand (thanks OIF)
• Core optical control planes all done
– GMPLS etc. (thanks IETF)
• Core integrated network planning all done
– PCE etc. (thanks IETF)
• But…
– New optical developments?
– Converged networks?
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– For optical networks to enable converged networking we need a fully-functional control plane
• IETF about to publish GMPLS for OTN
• IETF working on GMPLS for flexible grid
– For converged networking we need operational and management components
• IETF working on stateful and active PCE
• IETF looking at ways to integrate PCE and SDN into the wider converged network ecosphere
– Interface to the Routing System (I2RS)
– Application-Based network Operation (ABNO)
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• The IETF is the standards body for the Internet
• Anyone and everyone can participate
• All work on open email lists
• Ideas are written up as Internet-Drafts
• When there is community consensus they are published as RFCs
• At the network and lower layers it works best when driven by operator demands and vendor implementation
• A healthy balance of academic and research input
• Don’t forget the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF)
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• IDEALIST is an FP7 project working on multi-layer networks built on flexible grid lambdas
• Physical layer standardisation is complete
• ITU-T G.694.1
• The project is helping to standardise
• GMPLS control plane for flexi-grid (IETF)
• Multi-layer planning and provisioning (IETF)
• The participation of equipment vendors and operators is key
• This is standardisation for a purpose
• It is not a “pure research” project
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adrian@olddog.co.uk
The IDEALIST project http://www.ict-idealist.eu/
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