Open ROADM MSA Members AT&T, Ciena, Fujitsu, and Orange, together with University of Texas at Dallas, Demonstrating New Optical Network Capabilities at Optical Fiber Communications Conference

At this year’s Optical Fiber Communications Conference, Open ROADM MSA members AT&T*, Ciena, Fujitsu, Orange together with the University of Texas at Dallas will demonstrate how optical networking equipment based on the Open ROADM standards can quickly get back online in a disaster recovery scenario.

The Open ROADM Multi-Source Agreement (MSA) was launched in 2016 and is currently developing version 5 of the open optical and API specifications for a disaggregated optical transport layer. Published features include 100G, 200G, 300G and 400G transponder optical specifications, ROADM optical specifications for line side interoperable ROADM connections, as well as open YANG data models defining Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and topology models. All the published specifications can be downloaded on the OpenROADM.org website.

The demo on display at the OFC conference this month will show seamless multivendor interoperability between the Ciena and Fujitsu optical networking equipment. This optical networking gear is compatible with the Open ROADM MSA. The demonstration network to be operated by UT Dallas consists of Fujitsu 1FINITY™ ROADM and transponder blades and Ciena 6500 ROADM and transponders running applications at 100 Gbps over a DWDM optical network. Control plane services are provided by the TransportPCE project, which is part of the Fluorine OpenDaylight SDN controller release.

The system is connected via open APIs to a programmable optical network (PROnet) SDN orchestrator developed by UT Dallas. The orchestrator will create an on-demand optical circuit over the multivendor Open ROADM network and dynamically migrate virtual machines from one simulated data center to another simulated data center. This fully autonomous procedure demonstrates speed, efficiency and low latency in a disaster recovery scenario. The innovative demonstration is another step toward realizing the vision of the Open ROADM MSA, working to define multi-vendor interoperability specifications for software-enabled ROADM ecosystems.

“Expanding our network capacity and lowering operating costs has to go hand-in-hand with safeguarding reliability and resiliency,” said Chris Rice, senior vice president, Network Cloud & Infrastructure at AT&T. “This demonstration of interoperability further validates the work of the Open ROADM MSA group to eliminate vendor lock-in, introduce multi-vendor efficiencies to the transport network, and prove that these systems can seamlessly recover from disaster conditions.”

To view the demonstration, visit Open ROADM at OFC (Booth #6139) March 5-7 in San Diego. Other Open ROADM MSA members will also showcase their Open ROADM MSA compliant hardware.

“We believe it is important to offer solutions that address the full range of architecture requirements to help customers succeed with their transformation objectives, from fully integrated systems to disaggregated functions,” said Brodie Gage, Ciena’s vice president of Product Line Management.

“This demonstration shows that operating multi-vendor WDM infrastructures is finally achievable” said Christian Gacon, vice president, Wireline Networks and Infrastructure at Orange. “It highlights how interoperability and co-development in the open source community can speed-up the development process. Transport PCE reference implementation for the control of OpenROADM optical infrastructures allowed us to reach this goal in a limited time.”

“As a founding member of the Open ROADM MSA, Fujitsu is committed to furthering the principles of open networking and paving the way for greater programmability to enable faster deployment, increased scalability, cost savings and improved network performance,” said Rod Naphan, chief technology officer at Fujitsu Network Communications. “With our advanced Open ROADM solutions and interoperability expertise, Fujitsu is leading the charge to disaggregate optical transport systems to a blade-based architecture and foster innovations that benefit network service providers and their subscribers.”

“We are quite grateful to Fujitsu, Ciena and AT&T for becoming partners in optical networking research. Through this partnership, our students - mostly supported by the National Science Foundation - have had the unique opportunity to directly test new solutions and technologies in Software Defined Networking using commercial state-of-the-art optical network equipment and the Open ROADM software platform,” said Andrea Fumagalli, professor with the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, the University of Texas at Dallas. “We are also grateful to the UT Dallas Office of Information Technology team, which has closely worked with all the partners and prepared the infrastructure for demonstrating the network equipment and SDN capabilities at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing 2018 in Dallas.”