Accelerating Open Transport Industrialization
The Open Optical & Packet Transport project group at the Telecom Infra project continues delivering progress and innovation to transport networks. This year the project has successfully transitioned to a new phase, focusing on consolidating the most successful initiatives and the development of new use cases that can help transform telco networks over the next 5 years.
In this regard, the community has agreed and completed a new charter document and incorporated two new co-chairs: Lloyd Mphahlele, general manager for Transport and OSS Tools at MTN Group, and José Antonio Gómez, Senior Optical & SDN Transport Architect at Vodafone; this will contribute to lead the project team to a new level of success.
Key steps for the acceleration of the Disaggregated Open Routers adoption.
The disaggregated market for transport solutions continues to grow with Disaggregated Cell Site Gateways (DCSG) leading the way, boasting more than 27K units deployed worldwide. Last year, the DCSG workstream within the Disaggregated Open Router’s (DOR) subgroup (lead by Vodafone, Telefónica, KDDI, and MTN) launched release 2.0 of DCSG technical requirements, including new technical requirements for Segment Routing, and during 2024 the subgroup has successfully completed the evaluation and the results will be made available during the FYUZ event in Dublin November 11th-13th.
The Disaggregated Open Router’s (DOR) subgroup activity this year has been centered around the definition and evaluation of the Distributed Disaggregated Backbone Router – Provider Edge (DDBR-PE). The requirements compliance review has been made through the assessment of responses to the common TIP’s DDBR-PE detail technical requirements document, which includes more than 1400 requirement items, covering HW and SW categories such as Platform dimensions and capacity, Mechanical and Energy requirements, Base Routing, MPLS & SR, Enterprise services, OAM, Security and SDN protocols among others. Software and hardware scalability requirements have been also evaluated to build solutions up to 614.4Tbps.
The first TIP DDBR-PE Requirements Compliant Bronze Badges proving their compliance with the solution’s defined requirements will be announced at FYUZ too, and there the DOR subgroup will also disclose the main conclusions about the evaluation.
Additionally, the group has also completed the first TIP’s Silver Badges testing trial for TIP’s Distributed Disaggregated Backbone Routers for Provider and Internet Gateway roles (DDBR – P&IGW) solutions. This first testing has evaluated the compliance with TIP DDBR’s Provider and Internet Gateway roles test plan of a cluster solution consisting of UfiSpace 400G Disaggregated Fabric white boxes – S9705-48D (Broadcom Ramon) and S9700-23D and S9700-53DX (Broadcom Jericho 2) 400G/100G Disaggregated Core and Edge Router white boxes, orchestrated by Drivenets DNOS operating system v18.1.0.29.
It is also remarkable the efforts made by the DOR subgroup operators including, KDDI, Vodafone, Orange, MTN, Telefónica, Bell Canada, and BT, for assessing the testing results which are now under the scrutiny of the TIP’s Test and Validation Council which will determine the decision about this TIP Silver Badge awarding.
The pulse of IPoDWDM demand and the need for plug-and-play
One of the main potential costs’ reduction drivers at the moment for Telcos within the transport segment is the use of the new generation of coherent pluggable transceivers such as 400G ZR and ZR+ directly in routers instead of using traditional transponder solutions. This technology introduces the IP over DWDM (IPoDWDM) network architecture by collapsing the optical transmission and the IP into multi-layer (L0-L3) with IP routers equipped with this new generation of pluggable modules.
The TIP OOPT community has helped drive discussion on how to manage this new technology paradigm and the MANTRA subgroup has become a reference in the definition of the operators’ use cases and the target reference architecture to implement them.
This year the MANTRA subgroup has successfully completed its first Proof of Concept (PoC) for IPoDWDM technology. This groundbreaking initiative brought together leading telecom operators, including Vodafone, Telefónica, MTN, Orange, Telia Company, NTT Group, and Deutsche Telekom, alongside key vendors such as IPInfusion, UfiSpace, Ciena, and NEC. The collaboration aimed to demonstrate the seamless integration of 400G ZR+ coherent transceivers into routers, utilizing open interfaces like OIF CMIS and C-CMIS and NETCONF/gNMI OpenConfig based on test cases defined by the MANTRA subgroup.
The results of this successful PoC will be detailed in a comprehensive Whitepaper to be published by TIP in early November. This report will outline the key findings and serve as a valuable resource for the broader telecom community, furthering the development of IPoDWDM technology and standardization efforts.
This achievement underscores the value of collaborative innovation, setting the stage for a more interoperable and flexible future in open transport networks.
Consolidation of Open Optical Transport adoption
The value to vendors of the MUST’s subgroup target SDN architecture continues to be demonstrated with new vendors seeking and achieving compliance and earning badges. Notably, the MUST SDN architecture has seen increased adoption, as demonstrated by the successful evaluation of solutions like Fujitsu’s Virtuora Controller and Ciena’s Navigator NCS. These products have been awarded this year with the prestigious TIP bronze badges for compliance with the MUST SDN Controller Northbound and Southbound interface technical requirements.
This year also marked the evaluation of the first Silver Badge products, compliant with MUST Open Optical Terminal (O-OT) SDN technical requirements. Infinera’s G40 series compact modular optical transport solution and NEC’s disaggregated Phoenix Transponder have been successfully tested by Telefónica and Orange respectively. The evaluation results will be unveiled this year at FYUZ.
These commercial-grade solutions are compliant with NETCONF, gNMI, and OpenConfig models, ensuring they can be seamlessly integrated into MUST Open Optical SDN Architectures via standard APIs. The MUST subgroup is committed to continue developing technical requirements and the associated test plans to ensure full interoperability between SDN controllers and open optical terminals in future releases.
At the FYUZ event in October 2023, TIP MUST operators announced that T-API v2.5.0 has been chosen as the next major release for T-API. Additionally, the MUST SDN Controller Northbound Interface (NBI) 2.0 technical requirements were published in September 2024, including new use cases that will help drive development in Optical Transport SDN solutions in the coming years. These updates focus on key features such as streaming telemetry, physical impairment-aware optical topologies, and enhancements to the T-API-based open APIs in the latest standards.
The MUST subgroup is also collaborating with other TIP subgroups on innovative use cases. One example is the newly defined Open Optical Planning use case, which integrates a Physical Simulation Environment (PSE) and leverages GNPy for impairment validation in agnostic planning modules.
To enable the MUST Use cases, the PSE Subgroup is working on a YANG model to simplify the integration of GNPy into other control modules. It furthermore extended the feasibility model to the C+L-band and improved the ROADM modeling capabilities.
While a more detailed model improves accuracy, it is also true that operators often do not have all the parameters at hand when they model a network. The PSE Group is therefore investigating to leverage GNPy as Digital Twin for Bridging Physical Layer Knowledge Gaps in Multi-Domain Networks.
FYUZ 2024
The community will present one more year, their main achievements and successful results of the activities being driven by the project group at FYUZ, in Dublin on November 11th – 13th.
There, the audience will have the opportunity to listen to community leaders such Vodafone, KDDI, Telia Company, Telefónica, BT, Bell Canada, Deutsche Telekom and Liberty Global to mention just a few, presenting case studies based on their deployments and trials of disaggregated open transport technologies and their vision about the evolution and future outlook for the Open Transport market.
The results of TIP DDBR, DCSG and MUST technical evaluations will also be unveiled, and the audience will have the opportunity to get deeper insights about the vendor’s solutions which have been awarded with TIP badges. There will also be interesting panel discussions contending about the future of open transport in very important areas such as IP over DWDM technology and Aggregation router solutions. We cannot forget to mention there will be a dedicated session to Artificial Intelligence solutions for Open Transport where an excellent panel of experts will discuss how this new technology will revolutionize our industry in the coming years.
Next steps of the Open Optical & Packet Transport community
Looking ahead, the OOPT community will focus on the development of the IPoDWDM use cases building on the outcomes of the TIP MANTRA Proof of Concept. The MUST subgroup will work on defining the technical requirements for commercial solutions implementing Open & Standard Interfaces to manage the coherent pluggable transceiver modules in routing platforms, targeting end-to-end SDN management and plug-and-play integration via standard CMIS and openconfig.
Moreover, the GNPy open-source project is gaining momentum with the definition of its open API which has the potential for integration within the MUST architecture.
On the IP transport side, the community is now looking ahead to complete the portfolio of disaggregated open routers with new use cases for the Aggregation segment. A new initiative called Disaggregated Aggregation Routers (DAR) is under discussion at the moment. The interest that the first conversations about this new project are generating predicts a great impact of this new initiative in the coming years.