Managing Digital Coherent Optics in Routers
Pluggable Digital Coherent Optics (DCO) is a breakthrough technology that allows routers to integrate state of the art coherent DWDM interfaces without the need for specialized hardware. This is possible thanks to the incredible power efficiencies and compactness of recent DCO implementations over QSFP56-DD and other transceivers that can be deployed directly into standard 400GE host ports. Replacing traditional DWDM transponders by pluggable DCO significantly lowers the cost of building high-speed networks with massive capacity and extended reaches. Even greater gains in cost efficiencies are possible with Routed Optical Networking, a novel network architecture that couples DCO with innovations in IP/MPLS, management and automation to build a fully converged and programmable network architecture optimized at the packet switching layer.
As the industry embraces DCO, adoption increases and new use cases are explored, questions about how to manage this technology when deployed in the routers emerge. What are the new optical parameters that DCO expose to the router? How to leverage them for pro-active fiber and DWDM performance management? How to give visibility of that data to fellow transport operations teams and data lakes without exposing the IP network details?
This session will present DCO technology covering its basic concepts, the new optical signal monitoring capabilities enabled by its built-in the Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) and transport encapsulations, and how they can be used to enhance IP networks and their operations. It will also discuss the state of the industry standards and open networking initiatives that can be leveraged to build a multi-vendor ecosystem.
Speaker Emerson Moura