Thursday, February 12, 2015

OIF's FlexEthernet Aims for Incremental Speeds

Thursday, February 12, 2015  , , ,  

The Optical Internetworking Forum has launched a FlexEthernet project that will pave the way for Ethernet to more efficiently use optical link bandwidth.

FlexEthernet will support Ethernet speeds in between and beyond the fixed speeds currently defined.  It will do so by building upon the OIF’s multi-link gearbox (MLG) work that addresses multi-lane configuration.

A new FlexEthernet toolkit provides channelization, bonding and sub-rate functionality to connect one or more Ethernet MACs using standard Ethernet PMDs between equipment, either directly or through transport links.

“Ethernet connections between routers or transport gear needs to be flexible by providing incremental increases in bandwidth,” said Nathan Tracy of TE Connectivity and the OIF’s Technical Committee chair.  “The proposed FlexEthernet toolkit bridges the gap between previous, current and next-gen rates.

The OIF said its recent quarterly meeting also brought progress on its SDN Framework, a technical white paper identifying components and interfaces requiring standardization to provide a cohesive SDN app development framework designed around Web 2.0 technologies. Members also made progress on developing implementation agreements for SDN APIs addressing Topology, Service Request, Connection Request and Path Computation.

“The OIF is ahead of the industry in identifying specific work that needs to be done to bring SDN to fruition,” said Jonathan Sadler, Coriant and the OIF’s Technical Committee vice chair.   “The API documents are the outcome of the prototype SDN demonstration that took place late last year.  We have motivated, enthusiastic members working hard to finalize these APIs for service provider deployment.”

Members of the Physical and Link Layer Working group held a one-day interim meeting in addition to their usual three-day meeting discussing PAM4 and NRZ specifications as they continued work on the multiple CEI-56G projects.   The CEI-56G development work will increase the data rates by a factor of two over the data rate of CEI-28G while also defining new application spaces.  The group will hold another interim meeting before the Q2 meeting in April.

http://www.oiforum.com/technical-work/current-oif-work/
http://www.oiforum.com/oif-tackles-incremental-bandwidth-increases-with-flexethernet/