1. O LD D OG C ONSULTING Optical Networking and Converged Networks Impact and Trends in Standardisation Adrian Farrel adrian@olddog.co.uk

2. 2 of 8 Why Bother Standardising? Standardisation is principally for interoperability Conformance to standards can help in procurement Standards reduce development costs Standards reduce operational costs But – Optical interoperability has been pretty rare – Changing slightly with ROADMs – Will it change with converging network technologies? Maybe OTN and flexible wavelength grids interworking? May be interesting at the optical edge

3. 3 of 8 Research and Standardisation Standards describe what is built and deployed Research has a difficult role in standardisation – Not enough to document “great ideas” Must engage the commercial community – Cannot take complete ideas for “rubber stamp” Must engage the standardisation community – Research needs to be cutting edge May be too early for standardisation Optical technologies supporting converged networks are an interesting opening – Many companies want to help the research – Standards bodies are open to new ideas in this area

4. 4 of 8 What Standards Exist? Optical physical layer mainly done (thanks ITU-T) Optical physical interworking in hand (thanks OIF) Core optical control planes all done – GMPLS etc. (thanks IETF) Core integrated network planning all done – PCE etc. (thanks IETF) But… – New optical developments? – Converged networks?

5. 5 of 8 What is Coming Next? – For optical networks to enable converged networking we need a fully-functional control plane IETF about to publish GMPLS for OTN IETF working on GMPLS for flexible grid – For converged networking we need operational and management components IETF working on stateful and active PCE IETF looking at ways to integrate PCE and SDN into the wider converged network ecosphere – Interface to the Routing System (I2RS) – Application-Based network Operation (ABNO)

6. 6 of 8 How The IETF Works The IETF is the standards body for the Internet Anyone and everyone can participate All work on open email lists Ideas are written up as Internet-Drafts When there is community consensus they are published as RFCs At the network and lower layers it works best when driven by operator demands and vendor implementation A healthy balance of academic and research input Don’t forget the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF)

7. 7 of 8 IDEALIST and Standardisation IDEALIST is an FP7 project working on multi-layer networks built on flexible grid lambdas Physical layer standardisation is complete ITU-T G.694.1 The project is helping to standardise GMPLS control plane for flexi-grid (IETF) Multi-layer planning and provisioning (IETF) The participation of equipment vendors and operators is key This is standardisation for a purpose It is not a “pure research” project

8. 8 of 8 Questions? adrian@olddog.co.uk The IDEALIST project http://www.ict-idealist.eu/