1. Delivering a production service
Alien waves in GÉANT –
Delivering a production service
Guy Roberts
Senior Transport Network Architect, GÉANT
TNC 16, Prague
May

2. Agenda
Motivation
Amsterdam-Hamburg performance
Operational experience

3. Motivation 1 Traffic growth
LHCONE Monthly average Gbps
Year on year growth
Q > Q Growth ROUTING only
Q > Q Growth Including Lambdas
47.70%
26.40%

4. Motivation 2 Maximize utilization
The key to reducing the cost of R&E networks is to achieve high levels of infrastructure utilization.
A big part of the cost of transmission is fixed costs: fibre & common equipment.
Utilization rates are low in some parts of network, in particular fibre through Spain and Croatia/Slovenia.
Value-add for GÉANT of the Infinera equipment is:
The flexibility of the OTN layer
GMPLS control plane
Fast turn up on new services
Owning the fibre and amplifiers ourselves adds very little value to our service portfolio but makes services uneconomic where utilization is low.

5. 14,000km of lit dark fibre
€8M initial investment and then €2.5M per year.

6. Amsterdam – Hamburg First GÉANT AW implementation: 5 x 100G
The R&E community previously had two parallel fibres between Amsterdam and Hamburg.
Yellow fibre is SURFnet, Green is GÉANT.
Duplication of infrastructure dilutes utilization.
Solution: alien waves
Fibre now shared between SURFnet, NORDUnet and GÉANT using AWs
GÉANT’s fixed fibre costs are reduced by 2/3 compared to GÉANT only fibre.
Eliminating redundant fibre infrastructure

7. System performance Excellent receive margin
Receive sensitivity measured on two wavelengths in each direction on Ams-Ham system
Better than 10 dB receive margin in both directions – i.e power into Rx can fall by 10dB before errors are seen
10dB
12dB

8. Robustness testing Tolerant to input power variation
Power injection is reduced at two points:
Where the AW signal is injected into the fibre
Where the AW signal is injected into the Ciena equipment
In both cases the reduction in power did not result in a significant change in the pre-FEC BER.
Demonstrates that system is stable under power level changes.
Technical contributions from Rob Smets from SURFnet and the GÉANT Operations team

9. Long term Performance Q-factor
Worst Q-factor during the day from 15 minute bins
Blue dots direction towards Hamburg, orange in direction towards Amsterdam.
The red line shows the threshold at which post FEC errors could start to occur.
System is running error free post-FEC in both directions since March.

10. Long term Performance pre-FEC BER
Daily maximum pre-FEC bit error rate from 15 minute bins
Blue dots direction towards Hamburg, orange in direction towards Amsterdam.
System is running error free post-FEC in both directions since March.

11. Drawing lines of responsibility Demarcation points
Infinera Tx
Infinera Rx
Ciena ROADM
SURFnet owns ROADM, fibre and amplifiers
GÉANT owns transponders on DTN-X
Demarcation is fibre pair carrying 5 x 100G
Amplifier Tx Rx
Optical fiber
Service
Demarcation
GÉANT
transponders
Surfnet:
fibre, amplifiers and muxing
GÉANT
transponders

12. Alarm management Infinera alarms allow debugging of alien wave
Alarms and notification aid debugging: four types signal deterioration can be distinguished
If there is a loss of fidelity of the signal, this can be detected using pre-FEC threshold crossing notification
If the alien wave becomes so degraded that the Q-factor drops below 10, Infinera will raise a pre-FEC Q out of range alarm
A cut in the SURFnet fibre results in a Loss of Frame (LOF) alarm, some signal from the optical amplifiers leaks through, so there will not be a Loss of Signal (LOS) alarm.
If the local patching between GÉANT and SURFnet sites is broken, then a Loss of Signal (LOS) alarm is raised.
Infinera pre-FEC Q out of range alarm
Infinera Loss of Frame alarm

13. History of outages One planned maintenance and two unscheduled outages
Three outages since the system was commissioned:
17 Sept 2015: Unscheduled outage because of new fibre being provisioned by SURFnet where engineer disconnected GÉANT fibre.
24 Sept 2015: Planned maintenance announced by SURFnet
08 Oct 2015: Power failure in one of hut site in SURFnet’s network
Information comes from out ticket system
There have been no further outages since then.
Our Operations team is happy that the level of response from SURFnet to fibre outages matches the level we experience from commercial providers.

14. Uncertainties What we don’t know yet
Licencing model for AWs: works for Ams-Ham, but will this model carry over to other vendors?
How well will AWs work when fibre is multi-domain (concatenated between NRENs)?
How will vendors respond in the case of performance deterioration (risk of finger pointing)?
Can we integrate management systems between vendors?
What is the standardization future of AWs – do ‘Black Links’ have a future?

15. Summary
Amsterdam-Hamburg alien wave is saving money for the community by increasing utilization on shared fibre.
GÉANT has found the system to be robust and easy to manage.
We would like to increase AWs in our network in the future.
More experience is necessary with AWs on multi-domain fibre.

16. Any Questions?

17. AW brings savings cf. leased waves with only 2 x 100Gbps
Economics of alien waves
Actual costs for Ams-Ham
AW brings savings cf. leased waves with only 2 x 100Gbps
Annualized cost over 3 years in Euros

18. JRA T1 Next targets for AWs
GÉANT fibre leases end in 2020/21 – replacement planning starting now.
In SGA1, SA1 identified routes that could benefit from infrastructure sharing:
Milan – Geneva on GARR fibre
Madrid – Lisbon on RENATER RedIRIS fibre
Paris – Lisbon on RENATER, RedIRIS, FCCN, comm. fibre
Marseille – Milan on RENATER, GARR, commercial fibre
Marseille – Madrid on RENATER, RedIRIS commercial fibre
Budapest – Zagreb on NIIF, commercial fibre
In SGA2, JRA1 will work with local NRENs to design solutions.
Commercial options will also be evaluated.
Commercial fibre:
Between Bilbao & Bordeaux
Between Turin & Grenoble
Between Barcelona & Montpellier
Between Zagreb & Nagykanzsa
Slide: Alexander van der Hil