Alliance aims for 10Gbit/s mapping harmony: News from Fujitsu Microelectronics Europe

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Fujitsu Microelectronics Europe (FME) and Intel, two leading vendors of silicon to the high-speed communications industry, and Lucent Technologies, a leading supplier of telecommunication systems, have joined forces to bring a technology to market that will broaden the range of 10Gbit/s Ethernet applications carried over DWDM transport networks. The three have worked together with AimCom, an ASIC design house, to define a device that supports transparent mapping of a 10Gbit/s Ethernet LAN-PHY client (10GBase-R) into an OTU2 optical channel, as defined in the ITU-T Recommendation G.709. The value of this approach is that it combines today's different mapping schemes with further extensions that are compliant with both the IEEE standard (802.3ae-2002) and the ITU-T (G.709).

Customers benefit from this initiative, as it provides a path to a future-proof and cost-efficient mapping solution for 10 GE LAN client signals.

'This new technology enables our customers to provide unified solutions for the broadband backbone', says Bill Chatwell, General Manager of Intel's optical networking Components Division: 'and will ensure Intel's industry-leading position in this market segment'.

'We look forward to working with FME and are extremely pleased with Lucent's involvement'.

'Furthermore, we appreciate AimCom's valuable contribution in making this happen'.

The move has been welcomed by leading European telecomms operators and equipment manufacturers.

Matthias Berger, who oversees hardware circuit design at Lucent Technologies in Nuremberg, said: 'We are very interested in evaluating this technology for potential use in our next generation optical transport equipment'.

Dirk Weinsziehr, FME's Senior Director of Marketing said: 'We welcome this opportunity to work together with such strong players as Intel, Lucent Technologies and AimCom and to bring to market a solution that has already been positively received by numerous key providers'.

The OTN payload rates were defined to match the synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) signals STM-16 to STM-256, while satisfying the constraints of transoceanic optical line systems with 10G wavelengths, and the 10Gbit/s WAN-PHY (10Base-W) over the OTN defined by the IEEE in co-operation with the ITU-T.

The market, however, took a slightly different turn.

Market realities (such as volume-driven per-port costs) favoured the 10GE LAN PHY signal, designated as 10GBase-R.

Specified by IEEE802.3 for LAN applications, 10GBase-R traffic has rapidly increased in popularity as a WAN transport client.

The bitrate of the 10Gbit/s LAN-PHY interface is slightly higher (10.31Gbit/s) than the capacity of the most obvious OTN carrier, the OTU2 (9.95Gbit/s).

This is not a problem for applications complying with the existing specification of IPG and preamble in IEEE802.3, as these may be regenerated after traversing the optical network.

However, a number of vendors have used the preamble and interframe space for proprietary applications and such information is lost using the standard method described above.

With the growth in DWDM/OTN networks, and 10Gbit/s Ethernet likely to become their most important payload, the challenge is to perform a rate adaptation that allows OTN compliance for such applications without losing any of the proprietary information contained in the preamble from the Ethernet layer.

Various solutions that overcome this obstacle are already deployed.

A common drawback is that they either violate the OTN standard or use the Ethernet protocol in a proprietary way.

Both alternatives pose interoperability issues between different equipment vendors and prohibit electrical cross-connecting and multiplexing, eg towards 40Gbit/s OTU3.

And this has been a major impediment to its adoption by major telecomms companies to date.

The new device embraced by FME, Intel, Lucent Technologies and AimCom retains the ability to preserve information transparency while retaining the benefits of a standard compliant OTN signal in terms of frame structure and line speed, thus opening a path to a future-proof and cost-efficient mapping solution for 10 GE LAN client signals.

It is expected that the availability of this cost-efficient offering will quickly gain a strong following throughout the telecomms industry, consolidating the trend to move towards 10Gbit/s Ethernet transport over DWDM/OTN networking solutions that are not limited to a short-term horizon.

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Alliance aims for 10Gbit/s mapping harmony

Fujitsu Microelectronics Europe, Intel, Lucent Technologies and AimCom have defined a device that supports transparent mapping of a 10Gbit/s Ethernet LAN-PHY client into an OTU2 optical channel.