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Applying undersea technologies to Project Oxygen William C. Marra Tyco Submarine Systems Ltd. J. Holmdel, N. Tel: 732-949-7951; FAX: 732-949-3833 email: marra@submarinesystems.com

For the last 10 years undersea fiber optic connectivity has been used on a global scale to provide one of the most cost effective transmission mediums for international communications. Project Oxygen is a visionary network whose construction will be phased in time and connect more than 50 countries with up to 160,000 km of new undersea fiber optic cable. The network will integrate the newest and most sophisticated technologies for providing ubiquitous end-to-end customer telecommunications services. Some of the Division Multiplexing (DWDM) , undersea Branching technologies to be included are: Dense Wavelenb~ Units (BUS) and Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifiers (EDFAs) as they apply to undersea applications, Asynchronous Transport Mode (ATM), Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) and Plesiochronous Digital Hierarchy (PDH) transport capabilities and Network Management Systems (NMS).

In order to better understand how these technologies are applied to Project Oxygen, we start by itemizing the high level requirements that are applied to achieve the end-to-end network objectives of Project Oxygen. These include: global connectivity, low cost access to bandwidth, fast restoration, circuit provisioning and bandwidth on demand, and centralized monitor and control of the network.
Global connectivity, low cost access to bandwidth and fast restoration can be realized by constructing the network as a complex of interconnected loops. Each loop includes a multiplicity of undersea cable segments that terminate at cable landing stations. Each cable segment includes up to four pair of optical fibers and undersea repeaters equipped with EDFA technology to provide optical gain of the transmission signal. In some cases, BUS are installed in the main trunk cable and are used to split the fiber connectivity and route traffic to cable stations not necessarily needing the traffic capacity carried by entire undersea cable. In all cases, the transmission capacity is 160 Gb/s per fiber pair and it is made up of 16 WDM camer channels each channel operating a 10 Gb/s. Thus a four fiber pair cable segment can carry up to 64 individual WDM channels or 640 Gb/s of transmission capacity. These large transmission capacities drive down the access cost to bandwidth. As the cable segments close on themselves to form loops, it is possible to take advantage of SDH ring switching technologies by subdivision of the 64 channels into 32 service and 32 protection channels. This results in a layered WDM ring network which supports 32 independently operating fast bi-directional line switching logical rings. As the loops are inter-connected, global connectivity is achieved. Thus three of the high level network objectives are attained: global connectivity, fast restoration and the high capacity undersea technology provides the basis of low cost access to bandwidth. These concepts are illustrated in Figure 1 where two loops are shown. Each cable landing station is a network node which provides universal inter-operability between the high capacity undersea cable transmission medium and the in-country telecommunication service providers network. This is accomplished by providing a standardized STM-64 interface between the equipment which terminates the undersea cable segments and the equipment that interfaces to the in-land service providers network. This equipment that faces in-land provides several core h c t i o n s including ATM, SDH, and PDH customer traffic interfaces.

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0 1
Layered Rings

Single Loop Has Up To 64 Channels (32 Srv. & 32 Protn

KEY:

Cable Station (CS)

M Undersea Repeaters
I

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BU Branch Cable
Main Trunk Cable Customer Traffic

Figure 1: Illustration of inter-connected undersea cable loops & the formation of WDM layered ring structures within a single loop having flexible connectivity.
Circuit provisioning, bandwidth on demand, and centralized monitor and control of the network are achieved by embedding in the transmission facilities an overlay Wide Area Network (WAN). This WAN connects to the cable stations' Local Area Networks (LANs) and provides routing capabilities to and from the Network Operations Centers (NOCs) at gateway cable stations. The LAN established at each cable station is used to integrate that cable station's Element Managers (EMS) which are needed to monitor and control the transmission Network Elements (NEs) and undersea wet-plant equipment. This NMS hierarchical structure and L A " communications infrastructure is shown in Figure 2. The NOCs are duplicated with synchronized data bases. From any NOC it is possible to manage the entire network. This includes identifying problems, issuing corrective procedures, taking customer service requests and then configuring traffic across the network between customer interfaces, billing for services and setting the desired security management structure of the network.

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Service Management:

Network Management: Configuration of Traffic Fault Identification

NE

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NE

NE

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NE NOC: Network Operations Center CS: Cable Station EM: Element Managers NE: Network Element

Undersea NEs, e.g., Wet-Plant Supervisory, Power Transmission

Transmission NEs Facing In-Land Network

Cable Station (CS) Figure 2: Network Management System Communications and Feature Infiastructure
Conclusion: It has been 10 years since the first undersea fiber optic cable system (TAT-8) was installed between the US and Europe. Since that time market pressure has driven undersea cable system transmission capacities, on the average, to double each year driving down the circuit cost of international communications. In that t h e there have been some key enablers such as the incorporation of EDFAs in undersea repeaters, a better understanding on non-linear transmission effects which have driven improvements in fiber and cable design as well as new dispersion management techniques. Undersea qualified WDM technologies such as couplers, narrow-band filters, grating filters and stable narrow line-width lasers have added greatly to capacity increases. As capacities increased, it was necessary not only to focus on achieving higher transmission capacities for point-to-point networks, but to consider alternative network configurations which provide fast automatic restoration with overlay NMS infrastructures that support a vast array of features which make it possible to remotely manage global networks. These undersea technologies are applied in varying degrees across many undersea cable projects; however, Project Oxygen provides a unique opportunity to focus all of these technologies to one ubiquitous network on a global scale. References: 1. H.D. Howard, et.al., Deploying the Worlds Largest Undersea Fiber Cable System, NFOEC-98 Proceedings, September, 1998.