INFINERA DEMONSTRATES TRANSOCEANIC 40G SERVICES
OVER RECORD 8,477 KM
Lab Demo Shows Infinera 40G Solution’s Robustness to 65 ps of
PMD
Infinera has demonstrated the transmission of 40 Gigabit/second (Gb/s) services
over a distance of 8,477 kilometers across a transoceanic network spanning Europe
and the US, a record distance for a field trial involving 40 Gb/s services. Infinera
believes that this demonstration shows how key Infinera technical innovations can
enable service providers to offer new high bandwidth services such as 40 Gb/s or
OC-768/STM-256 Packet over SONET (POS) services today, and 100 Gigabit
Ethernet (100GbE) in the future, over existing infrastructures with less cost and
greater flexibility than the 40 Gb/s solutions offered by traditional WDM providers.
In a separate demonstration at Infinera labs, Infinera demonstrated the successful
transmission of 40 Gb/s services over 2,000 kilometers of fibre with extremely high
levels of polarisation mode dispersion (PMD), to illustrate the viability of Infinera’s 40
Gb/s solution for real-world networks with fibres suffering from high PMD.
Both demonstrations were made possible by two key Infinera innovations. First, the
development of Infinera’s large-scale photonic integrated circuits (PICs) which
consolidate ten 10 Gb/s wavelengths into a pair of monolithic integrated circuits, and
provides 100Gb/s of service-carrying capacity in a single circuit pack used in
Infinera’s DTN dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) system. This
capability is complemented by Infinera’s development of a Digital Virtual
Concatenation (DVC) protocol, which enables super-wavelength services such as
OC-768/STM-256, and 100 GbE in the future, to be mapped to the 10 Gb/s signals
transmitted from the PICs, and then re-assembled error-free at the other end of the
optical link. These technologies should also allow future super-wavelength services,
such as OC-768/STM-256, to co-exist on a common DWDM system with 10 Gb/s
and sub-wavelength services at 1 Gb/s or 2.5 Gb/s.
The transoceanic transmission field trial demonstration took place in August 2007 in
a live production network, and involved the service transmission of a 40Gb/s OC768/STM-256 service over a 1,969 km terrestrial network spanning Frankfurt to Paris
to London to a trans-oceanic cable head-end on the English coast, then connecting
to a 6,320 km subsea network, and then connecting to another 188 km terrestrial
backhaul network linking a cable landing site on the US coast to New York City. The
demonstration used an Infinera DTN system equipped with a 40 Gb/s Tributary
Adapter Module which mapped one OC-768/STM-256 service into four 10 Gb/s
channels, thereby allowing 40 Gb/s service transmission over an existing network
infrastructure designed only for 10 Gb/s transmission.
In a second demonstration, Infinera demonstrated at its labs in Columbia, Maryland,
USA, the transmission of 40 Gb/s services over 2,000 km of fiber with high levels of
polarisation mode dispersion (PMD) using Infinera DTN systems supporting 800 Gb/s
of DWDM capacity. In this demonstration the 40Gb/s service was mapped into four
10 Gb/s wavelengths before being transmitted over 26 spans of fibre. The 40 Gb/s
service was then re-assembled at the receive end with error-free transmission. PMD
was introduced into the line, with error-free transmission consistently maintained up
to 65 picoseconds (ps) of peak differential group delay (DGD), the most common
measure of PMD. This level of PMD tolerance is more than three times the PMD
tolerance of most 40 Gb/s –capable DWDM systems on the market today.
“Bandwidth Virtualisation”
The Digital Virtual Concatenation protocol developed by Infinera for carrying a 40
Gb/s service over an infrastructure of 10 Gb/s wavelengths has the potential to
enable international IP networks to scale to carry 40 Gb/s router trunks across
existing networking infrastructures including terrestrial and transoceanic networks.
The DTN System decouples the services carried over the network from the
underlying optical networking infrastructure. The 40 Gb/s demonstration is intended
to illustrate how this approach can also be applied to allow super-wavelength
services to be provisioned, managed, and monitored as single logical circuits, even
while the physical transmission is at lower wavelength speeds. This technique, which
Infinera calls bandwidth virtualisation, is designed to give service providers the
flexibility to carry a broad range of services over today’s infrastructure and with better
economics. Infinera also believes that this approach is extensible in the future to 100
Gigabit Ethernet service transport, allowing DTN systems deployed today to support
ultra-high bandwidth services in the future.
Many service provider networks suffer from high PMD levels on some portions of
their fibre plant. This problem is particularly acute for some national carriers in North
America, Europe, and Asia where sections of older or legacy fiber do not meet the
performance standards of more recently manufactured fiber. We believe that this
demonstration shows that the Infinera 40 Gb/s solution can be deployed wherever 10
Gb/s wavelengths can be deployed, enabling service providers to offer 40 Gb/s
services today without the need for expensive re-engineering of their fiber plants.
By decoupling the available bandwidth, and the optical services sold, from the
physical infrastructure carrying that bandwidth, the Infinera vision of bandwidth
virtualisation is designed to enable service providers to meet the growth demands of
the IP network, and offer a wider variety of profitable services more quickly, flexibly,
and without expensive re-engineering or fibre plant characterisation costs.
About Infinera
Infinera provides Digital Optical Networking systems to telecommunications carriers
worldwide. Infinera's systems are unique in their use of a breakthrough
semiconductor technology: the Photonic Integrated Circuit (PIC). Infinera's systems
and PIC technology are designed to provide optical networks with simpler
engineering and operations, faster time-to-service, and more flexible networking. For
more information, please visit www.infinera.com.
Media contacts:
Richard Scarlett / Joe Banks
Johnson King
020 7357 7799
InfineraTeam@johnsonking.co.uk