Tad Hofmeister of Google joins board of directors

Members of the Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) recently met in Ljubljana, Slovenia for a quarterly technical committee and approved an implementation agreement (IA) for an optical Virtual Transport Network Service.  They also made progress on the 400G-ZR project and were given a presentation on 100G and Beyond by Andre Pucko of Telekom Slovenije d.d.  Additionally, Tad Hofmeister of Google joins the board of directors, filling an open seat.

A Virtual Transport Network Service (VTNS) is the creation and offering of a Virtual Network (VN) by a provider to a user and is built on the virtualization of transport network resources. VNs may be dynamically created, deleted, or modified and users can perform connection management, connection monitoring and connection protection within their VN.

“Development of Transport SDN (Software Defined Networking) will enable service providers to offer new revenue generating services,”  said Lyndon Ong of Ciena and the OIF’s Market Awareness & Education Committee Co-Chair, Networking. “VTNS is one class of services of interest to many operators and can become a main driver for the deployment of SDN in their transport networks.”

In specifying the new VTNS IA, OIF identifies the requirements and characteristics of different virtual network service types, such as dynamic and static behaviors, as well as the attributes and parameters required for these service types and the requirements for support of service recovery and OAM. Different types of VTNS could be associated with operators offering, for example, Bandwidth on Demand (BoD) services, Network as a Service (NaaS) or Network Slicing for 5G Networking.

400G-ZR Project Update

The OIF’s 400G-ZR Interoperability project addresses both 400G ZR and short-reach DWDM multivendor interoperability such as might be required for cloud scale data center interconnect (DCI). The project made progress at the Q2 meeting by receiving 10 technical contributions addressing considerations such as power consumption of DSP, FEC proposals and experimental demos.  The work will continue to move forward with scheduled conference calls before the Q3 meeting.

OIF at Optinet China

OIF board member Junjie Li of China Telecom will speak at Optinet China in Beijing on June 13, 2017 at 12:25 pm.  Mr. Li will present “OIF Interop – the Key to Unlocking the Benefits of SDN”.

For more information on this presentation and other conferences that the OIF is speaking at click here.

About the OIF

The OIF facilitates the development and deployment of interoperable networking solutions and services. Members collaborate to drive Implementation Agreements (IAs) and interoperability demonstrations to accelerate and maximize market adoption of advanced internetworking technologies. OIF work applies to optical and electrical interconnects, optical component and network processing technologies, and to network control and operations including software defined networks and network function virtualization. The OIF actively supports and extends the work of national and international standards bodies. Launched in 1998, the OIF is the only industry group uniting representatives from across the spectrum of networking, including many of the world’s leading service providers, system vendors, component manufacturers, software and testing vendors. Information on the OIF can be found at http://www.oiforum.com.