Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Ireland's HEAnet Tests GMPLS with Juniper+ADVA

HEAnet, Ireland's national education and research network, in collaboration with Juniper Networks and ADVA Optical Networking, successfully demonstrated the automated setup of optical circuits between Juniper Networks routers via an ADVA Optical Networking DWDM optical network, using a common signaling protocol.



The goal was to integrate packet-layer routers and optical-transport systems via a common control plane. The HEAnet network consists of Juniper Networks MX Series 3D Universal Edge Routers and ADVA FSP 3000 DWDM equipment.



The GMPLS control plane enabled the initiating router to discover, reserve and then build an optical circuit across the optical network without any user intervention beyond the original user commands on the initiating router.



"This is one of the first customer GMPLS interworking tests between router and optical equipment manufacturers, said Eoin Kenny, project leader, HEAnet. "It demonstrates how an Internet service provider can use GMPLS to provision circuits automatically across its optical network from a router in one simple step." http://www.advaoptical.com http://www.heanet.ie/

  • In February, ADVA Optical Networking introduced Agile Core Express functionality for its FSP 3000 platform, enabling service providers to use their optical transport network more flexibility and on-demand while supporting 100 Gbps transmission speeds. The agility is created by allowing the IP/MPLS layer to communicate with the optical transport layer.