PMC announces industry’s first OTN switching solutions to comply with new OIF protocol

SUNNYVALE, USA: PMC-Sierra Inc. announced that its HyPHY family of OTN processors provide full architectural support of the Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF)’s new OTN-over-Packet-Fabric Protocol Implementation Agreement (IA). The OIF initiative aims to help the industry develop an ecosystem for interoperable OTN switching at the silicon and optical equipment levels, which meets carriers’ needs to drive mass deployment of OTN switching in their networks.

“Carriers worldwide are adopting OTN switching as a method to provide sub-wavelength switching to their converged optical transport infrastructure,” said Mark Pashan, general manager, optical transport products, Tellabs. “The ability to combine OTN with packet switching on the same platform provides them maximum flexibility in network designs to optimize costs.”

The OIF IA defines a method for switching OTN streams, including the newly standardized ODU0 and ODUflex streams, over cell or packet switch fabric technology. This enables Packet Optical Transport Platforms (P-OTPs) to be based on a single fabric, which results in significantly simpler designs that consume less power and shelf space. According to industry estimates, the P-OTP equipment market is expected to grow more than 20 percent per year through 2015.

P-OTPs are quickly gaining traction in next-generation optical transport networks because they provide both OTN switching and packet switching in a single platform. This is a significant advantage as optical networks continue to evolve from pure TDM (SONET/SDH) to converged packet and OTN architectures. The OIF agreement passed final ballot in November 2011, and formal public release is expected in January 2012.

“PMC has significant experience in delivering architecture-level solutions for metro transport optical networking equipment, and we are pleased to be a contributing partner to this important OIF initiative along with our customers and other companies,” said Babak Samimi, VP, marketing and applications for PMC’s Communication Products Division. “With industry alignment and our HyPHY multi-service OTN processing solutions in volume production, carriers can now deploy OTN switching in their metro networks.”

PMC’s HyPHY 20G and HyPHY 10G OTN processors provide a fully compliant implementation of the OIF IA via the Constant Bit Rate Interface (CBRI) and OTN Phase Signalling Algorithm (OPSA). CBRI, which is compliant with the Interlaken protocol, enables HyPHY to connect to a centralized packet/cell switch fabric and is capable of supporting hybrid packet/OTN switched line card designs.

OPSA provides for the segmentation, reassembly and frequency/phase encoding/decoding required to support OTN over a packet/cell fabric. The HyPHY 20G handles up to 40Gb/s of multi-service line-side traffic via 16-SFP, 2-XFP/SFP+, and 2-SFI-4.1 interfaces. In addition to P-OTP OTN switching line card applications, HyPHY also enables single-chip, low-power multi-service OTN muxponder and transponder line cards.