Ciena Demos Single Wavelength 100G Transmission

Ciena, in partnership with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), demonstrated 100 Gbps over a single wavelength during the Supercomputing Conference 2008 (SC08), which was held in late November.


Unlike previous 100G tests that combined two 40G optical signals or inversely multiplexed ten 10G optical signals, Ciena said this demonstration offered the first true, single wavelength transmission of a 100G data stream, through 80 km of fiber. Ciena electrically combined ten 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) signals from switches in the Caltech exhibit area onto a single wavelength for transmission over Ciena's CN 4200 RS FlexSelect Advanced Services Platform, then returned the separated 10 GbE signals back to Caltech's booth. The transmission featured an actual line rate of 112 Gbps and a true 100 Gbps OTN-framed payload using enhanced forward error correction (EFEC). And, by interoperating with leading switching technologies and using FDT, a production-ready TCP application developed by Caltech, more than one petabyte (one million gigabytes) of data, roughly equivalent to that of 125,000 full-length DVDs, was transferred during a 12-hour period.


The full C-band tunable transceiver in Ciena's CN 4200 RS used dual polarization RZ-DQPSK modulation, allowing for deployment alongside 10G and 40G channels on existing DWDM systems, and enabling scalability up to 8 Tbps
capacity on an optical fiber with existing Ciena DWDM systems. The transceiver's hardware technology employs a flexible architecture that is capable of adapting to any standard 10G client rate utilizing standard XFP optical modules, while the firmware allows for rapid adaptation to emerging OTN standards.


Ciena also noted that in real-word applications, where there are bidirectional links involved (one 100G wavelength in each direction), the maximum capacity for data flowing in both directions is 200G. In this context of a bi-directional model, the
demonstration achieved a net payload average of 191 Gbps during the 12-hour period, as sourced and measured by the Caltech TCP application.


According to Professor Harvey Newman of Caltech, head of the high energy physics team and chair of the U.S. Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Users Organization's Executive Committee, "The collaborative efforts of Ciena and our Caltech-led high energy physics team represent a critical milestone in the industry's roadmap for transitioning from 10G to 100G links, particularly across existing transoceanic fiber spans. Faster link transmission of this kind allows, for example, Caltech and researchers from CERN to instantly share critical data associated with the LHC project by increasing the capacity and efficiency of the U.S. Large Hadron Collider Network (USLHCNet). In particular, we hope developments such as these will afford physicists and students throughout the world the opportunity to participate directly in the LHC program, and potentially make important scientific discoveries."

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