The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF), which met recently in Ljubljana, Slovenia for a quarterly technical committee conference, announced that it has approved an implementation agreement (IA) for an optical virtual transport network service (VTNS) and also made progress on the 400G-ZR project.
VTNS IA
A virtual transport network service (VTNS) constitutes the creation and delivery of a virtual network (VN) by a provider to a user based on the virtualisation of transport network resources. VNs can be dynamically created, deleted or modified, while users are able to perform connection management, monitoring and protection within the VN.
In specifying the new VTNS IA, OIF aims to identify the requirements and characteristics of different virtual network service types, such as dynamic and static behaviours. The new IA is also intended to define the attributes and parameters required for these service types and the requirements for support of service recovery and OAM.
The OIF noted that different types of VTNS could be associated with operators offering, for example, bandwidth-on-demand (BoD) services, network-as-a-service (NaaS) or network slicing for 5G networking.
400G-ZR update
The OIF's 400G-ZR interoperability project, launched in November 2016, was formed to address both 400 Gbit/s ZR and short-reach DWDM multi-vendor interoperability requirements, such as might be required for cloud-scale data centre interconnect (DCI) applications. It noted that the project has now received 10 technical contributions relating to areas including power consumption of DSP, FEC proposals, and experimental demonstrations.
In addition, it was announced that at the recent quarterly meeting the OIF elected Tad Hofmeister of Google to its board of directors, filling a vacant seat on the board.
