What makes a Cloud “Carrier Cloud”?

In cloud, lies opportunities for carriers. What traditional cloud has not been able to achieve, carrier cloud has all those ingredients to  deliver. What makes carrier cloud different than traditional public and enterprise clouds? First few words about what is public and enterprise cloud? Public Cloud are designed on the concept of  “ Scale Out” i.e. as […]

Operators’ Options in choosing TDM/Packet based transport equipment

In my last post, I had explained that it would be bandwidth in-efficient to carry TDM over Ethernet/IP links; today I came across an interesting white paper by Heavy Reading which indirectly does point to this fact and argues that it is better and efficient to keep TDM traffic completely over TDM network. The white […]

Is Circuit Emulation Bandwidth-Efficient?

Let’s face it. As an operator, you are faced with a situation of deciding between circuit emulation over Ethernet and carrying TDM data as  pure TDM transport; what would be your choice? In fact! There seems to be some confusion regarding the extent of efficiency when circuit emulation is used to carry TDM data over […]

NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) and its relation to SDN

NFV is all about visualizing network as seen from the perspective of IT. It leverages standard IT industry virtualization concepts to consolidate many network elements onto industry high volume servers, switches and storage. The network is visualized as servers that will be able to deliver services to operators as they are given by today’s hardware […]

400G is decided to be the next rate after 100G

The past year was hectic in terms of discussions regarding what could the next client rate for Ethernet and at the same time discussions were going on to decide the next line rate. There was a debate on whether the industry should go for 400GE or jump straight to 1 Terabit. Earlier in the same […]

RSVP-TE and OSPF-TE extensions for GMPLS

Packets in MPLS are routed according to preconfigured label switched paths (LSPs). When packets are received, label lookup is performed from which it is identified to which LSP packets belong to and hence it identifies the next hop of the packet. GMPLS generalizes the concept of MPLS. Instead of the concept of labels, GMPLS uses […]

Need for OSNR Testers for Pol Mux Modulations

OSNR ( Optical Signal to Noise Ratio)  is a critical and important parameter in high speed DWDM links. If OSNR is not good it will seriously affect the distance reachability in DWDM systems before regeneration is required. OSNR testing is typically done with OSA (Optical Spectrum Analyzer).  There are standard test sets available to test […]

Soft Decision FEC ( SD FEC) versus Hard Decision FEC

As data rates increase beyond 10G, the requirements for OSNR become stringent. This is because the advanced modulation techniques used at higher bit rates require higher OSNR performance. Low OSNR is directly related to poor BER performance in DWDM networks. FEC or Forward error connection is a method used to achieve coding gain for higher […]

Optical ASON or Electrical ASON!

The debate still lingers on. When it comes to protection and re-routing  on High speed links, what is the benefit of using Optical ASON versus Electrical ASON. The Optical ASON relates to lambda switching ( Also called WSON-Wavelength Switched Optical Network). This necessitates the need of using at  minimum Multi degree and directionless functionality. Using colorless […]