Huawei Proposes Software Defined Optical Transport Network (OTN) Technology in ECOC 2012

Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, proposed a Software Defined Optical Transport Network (OTN) in the recently closed European Conference of Optical Communication (ECOC) 2012. By systematically elaborating the understanding on technology evolution of next-generation optical networks, Huawei proposed a new direction for optical network development and led the industry’s continuous innovation.

The accelerative emerging services such as social networking and video on demand produce increasing requirement on bandwidth elasticity and dynamics, which results in great challenge to existing optical networks. Next-generation optical networks with software defined features are more and more recognized by the industry, and also became the most eye-catching workshop topic in ECOC 2012 - one of the most important and prestigious worldwide events in optical communications.

In the workshop, Huawei proposed the Software Defined OTN for the first time, and introduced the enabling technologies. As one of the essential embodiments of Huawei’s telecom-oriented software defined network (SDN), Software Defined OTN has the key features of instant bandwidth provisioning, flexible bandwidth pipeline, and programmable transport controller, which meet the demands of forthcoming high-speed and highly-dynamic traffic boom and bring network operators with benefits of 100% resource utilization as well as much simplified and refined OAM. Huawei considered the key technologies to include flexible-grid ROADM, flexible transceiver, flexible OTN and programmable transport controller.

Transport networks have constructed the fundamental infrastructure of information and communication industry. Huawei has long-standing commitment in transport technologies and has been building the technology architecture for next-generation transport networks. Huawei conducted the world's first pan-European 400G field trial and unveiled a brand-new series of innovation in 2012, including a 10 petabit all-optical switch prototype PPXC, a flexible-grid WDM prototype with the industry's highest spectrum efficiency, and a 2T WDM prototype.