technology technology

By John C Tanner

Bringing packets
into the light
Telcos want to flatten their packet and optical network layers,
but the right solution depends on how optical-centric or
packet-centric your vendor is

T
he term “convergence” may
be one of the most over-
used and overhyped words
in telecoms, but there’s no
better way to describe the
current interest in flattening the IP and
optical layers of the network.
The idea of packet-optical conver-
gence – which in broad terms means
taking packet networks (namely Carrier
Ethernet), Sonet/SDH and DWDM and
flattening them down into one network
that does everything those layers do
separately – has been around for some
time.
However, in early 2009, US opera-
tor Verizon threw the gauntlet down
to vendors when Stuart Elby, VP of
network architecture at Verizon Net-
work & Technology, said at an OFC
conference that it intended to trans-
form its global network into a packet-
optical transport system (P-OTS) that
would combine Layer 1 and Layer 2
functionality and into a much more
efficient and cost-effective network
with an integrated control plane. And
Verizon wanted suppliers to come
up with boxes that would help them
achieve it.
The basis for Verizon’s demand was
an internal analysis that found IP transit
traffic patterns and demand for flexible
routes were so dynamic that IP traffic
at the optical layer often didn’t have to
touch the network routers.
“That adage of ‘switch where you
can, route where you must’ has never
gone away, and Verizon wanted its IP
transit traffic that didn’t need routing
to stay in the optical layer,” explains
Anup Changaroth, product marketing
director for Asia for Nortel Networks’
MEN business recently purchased by
Ciena. “It’s a very costly affair to put
routers in place and take your IP traf-
fic up to that layer if you don’t need
to.”
Verizon concluded that to support
those dynamic traffic patterns and by-
pass routers, “it made more sense to
have the optical layer using MPLS-TP
as the key switching mechanism. And
they’ve been driving vendors to look at
that,” says Changaroth, adding that car-
riers in Japan and elsewhere have done
their own internal studies and reached
the same conclusions in the last six
months.
Infonetics, meanwhile, found in a
survey last year that two-thirds of serv-
ice providers plan to combine their data
and transport operations sometime next
year. And vendors are now jockeying for
position to help them do just that.
We have the technology
The technological advances enabling
the push to packet-optical convergence
are already here: Ethernet-over-SDH,
ROADM (for wavelength-switching),
ASON (Automatically Switched Optical
Network), GMPLS (which allows MPLS
to run on the control plane) and OTN
(Optical Transport Network) switch-
ing.
OTN is one of the key technologies
mentioned in Verizon’s P-OTS strat-
egy. Verizon intends to implement a
“wavelength-centric OTN-compliant
network” supporting multi-vendor in-
teroperable OTN-compliant (G.709)
interfaces.
“OTN is key because it brings a lot
of the good manageability stuff from
Sonet/SDH to optical, so you can see
the traffic, detect faults, all the opera-
tional management stuff and granular-
ity from SDH,” Changaroth says.
It also supports legacy TDM traf-
fic, which is crucial to packet-optical
convergence, he adds. “TDM may not
be growing by leaps and bounds as
much as IP traffic, but it still generates
a huge amount of revenue for telcos, so
anyone who says they can just get rid of
that TDM Sonet/SDH layer is kidding
themselves.”
Bandwidth and cost
efficiencies
Of all the benefits of flattening the
IP and optical layers, there are two re-
curring themes: more efficient band-
width usage and lower costs.
“By bringing several layers of their
network together, service providers
can reduce the number of devices in
the network, the space and power con-
sumption,” says Luc Ceuppens, market-
ing VP of high-end systems for Juniper
Networks. “That will help them not
only get capex down but prepare for the
future services they want to run over

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technology
“Optical-centric vendors will develop
optical transport with some packet
capabilities, and packet-centric vendors
will develop packet-oriented gear with
some optics integrated into it”
these networks.”
Ronen Mikdashi, AVP and head of
the product marketing department at
ECI Telecom, agrees that packet-optical
convergence will help reduce capex and
opex, but adds that the savings don’t
just come from the hardware.
“In this type of convergence, soft-
ware should support all the layers in
a single management system to sup-
port end-to-end provisioning, which
reduces time to market, response time
to customer needs for expansion, and
other things that can also help to reduce
costs,” he says.
Meanwhile, bandwidth efficiency
gains are a matter of having the flex-
ibility and sufficient granularity to fill
lightwaves to capacity, Mikdashi says.
“If you have a 40G WDM channel
and you’re only using 10 Gbps of it be-
cause your Ethernet service only runs at
10G, you can multiplex several other low-
bit subservices onto it, running as low as
2 Mbps,” he says. “You can fill it with 4 x
2.5G or 10 x 1G or 100 x 100 Mbps and
so on – any combination you like, so all
your channels are fully utilized.”
Alcatel-Lucent – which fired the first
shot in the packet-optical convergence
wars with its converged backbone trans-
formation (CBT) strategy launched in
September – touted its ability to groom
traffic not only at the wave level, but
also the sub-port level using ODUflex
technology, an emerging ITU standard
due for completion next year, which
provides higher granularity by enabling
VLANs or pseudowires within a port to
be logically or virtually mapped to the
same wave.
Result: carriers can maximize ca-
pacity without spending more money
on extra core routers, and yield capex
28 Jan/Feb 2010 Telecom Asia www.telecomasia.net
savings of “at least 30%, in addition to
savings in power, space and operational
complexity”.
Optical-centric or packet-
centric
A minor war is already brewing
over just how much money telcos can
save depending on whose solution they
choose – or rather, how focused their
convergence strategy is on bringing the
packet layer to DWDM or the other way
around.
There is a difference, says Ceup-
pens of Juniper – and one that tends to
be defined by the core expertise of the
vendor.
“You have players in the optical
world and the packet world and they’ll
each approach this new product in their
own way,” he says. “Optical-centric ven-
dors will develop optical transport with
some packet capabilities, and packet-
centric vendors will develop packet-ori-
ented gear with some optics integrated
into it.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Juniper says
the latter approach will ultimately save
telcos more money in the long run.
A cost analysis from Juniper reckons
that that a packet-centric integration
solution (i.e. MPLS-based with OTN
switching) would cost 65% less than a
traditional optical network, while an
optical-centric solution (i.e. hybrid
router and MPLS/OTN switching)
would save just under 50%.
That said, Ceuppens admits the cost
model makes specific assumptions that
won’t apply uniformly to different net-
works.
Which is as well, since operator de-
cisions on a packet-optical convergence
strategy will be determined by the ar-
chitecture already in place, says Mik-
dashi of ECI.
“Some operators want a very intel-
ligent Ethernet network with some ba-
sic WDM capabilities, but others that
already have a complicated optical layer
want an intelligent optical network with
mesh capabilities, ROADM, etc, and a
basic Ethernet layer,” he says.
It also depends on what TDM and
Ethernet services they have at the time,
Mikdashi adds. “If their network is
dominated by Ethernet and IP services,
they can deploy a packet-optical net-
work that’s more oriented on Ethernet
and is stronger on Ethernet capabilities
than optical. So there’s no one rule of
thumb.”
Ceuppens agrees, and adds that
despite the fact that operator interest
in packet-optical convergence is high,
actual implementation is going to take
time as telcos weigh their options on
when and where to flatten the packet
and optical layers with minimal disrup-
tion to existing services.
“It will be slow because of the
amount of legacy equipment and ar-
chitecture carrying live traffic,” he says.
“As a service provider you don’t want
to mess with your customer. So very
often they work with overlays – create
that NGN and then migrate customers
over to that. It’s only when it’s proven
that the new network is cost-effective
that they’ll make the effort to migrate
customers over to it.”
There will also be one other conver-
gence issue that telcos will have to re-
solve, adds Mikdashi – interdepartmen-
tal convergence.
“For many Tier 1 operators, the
packet divisions and optics divisions
are usually separate,” he says. “So telcos
do have to look at how this is going to
affect those two divisions.”
Changaroth of Nortel agrees. “Or-
ganizationally SDH/optical and IP op-
erate as separate business units. So op-
erators will be more challenged to drive
them to work more closely together.
Some are already doing it, but it will still
be an issue for many.” TA