OFC/NFOEC 2012 industry reflections - Part 1

The recent OFC/NFOEC show, held in Los Angeles, had a strong vendor presence. Gazettabyte spoke with Infinera's Dave Welch, chief strategy officer and executive vice president, about his impressions of the show, capacity challenges facing the industry, and the importance of the company's photonic integrated circuit technology in light of recent competitor announcements.

OFC/NFOEC reflections: Part 1 

"I need as much fibre capacity as I can get, but I also need reach" 

Dave Welch, Infinera

Dave Welch values shows such as OFC/NFOEC: "I view the show's benefit as everyone getting together in one place and hearing the same chatter." This helps identify areas of consensus and subjects where there is less agreement.

And while there were no significant surprises at the show, it did highlight several shifts in how the network is evolving, he says.

"The first [shift] is the realisation that the layers are going to physically converge; the architectural layers may still exist but they are going to sit within a box as opposed to multiple boxes," says Welch. 

The implementation of this started with the convergence of the Optical Transport Network (OTN) and dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) layers, and the efficiencies that brings to the network. 

That is a big deal, says Welch. 

Optical designers have long been making transponders for optical transport. But now the transponder isn't an element in the integrated OTN-DWDM layer, rather it is the transceiver. "Even that subtlety means quite a bit," say Welch. "It means that my metrics are no longer 'gray optics in, long-haul optics out', it is 'switch-fabric to fibre'."

Infinera has its own OTN-DWDM platform convergence with the DTN-X platform, and the trend was reaffirmed at the show by the likes of Huawei and Ciena, says Welch: "Everyone is talking about that integration."

The second layer integration stage involves multi-protocol label switching (MPLS). Instead of transponder point-to-point technology, what is being considered is a common platform with an optical management layer, an OTN layer and, in future, an MPLS layer.

"The drive for that box is that you can't continue to scale the network in terms of bandwidth, power and cost by taking each layer as a silo and reducing it down," says Welch. "You have to gain benefits across silos for the scaling to keep up with bandwidth and economic demands." 

Super-channels

Optical transport has always been about increasing the data rates carried over wavelengths. At 100 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps), however, companies now use one or two wavelengths - carriers - onto which data is encoded. As vendors look to the next generation of line-side optical transport, what follows 100Gbps, the use of multiple carriers - super-channels - will continue and this was another show trend. 

Infinera's technology uses a 500Gbps super-channel based on dual polarisation, quadrature phase-shift keying (DP-QPSK). The company's transmit and receive photonic integrated circuit pair comprise 10 wavelengths (two 50Gbps carriers per 50GHz band). 

Ciena and Alcatel-Lucent detailed their next-generation ASICs at OFC. These chips, to appear later this year, include higher-order modulation schemes such as 16-QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) which can be carried over multiple wavelengths. Going from DP-QPSK to 16-QAM doubles the data rate of a carrier from 100Gbps to 200Gbps, using two carriers each at 16-QAM, enables the two vendors to deliver 400Gbps. 

"The concept of this all having to sit on one wavelength is going by the wayside," say Welch.

Capacity challenges 

"Over the next five years there are some difficult trends we are going to have to deal with, where there aren't technical solutions," says Welch.

The industry is already talking about fibre capacities of 24 Terabit using coherent technology. Greater capacity is also starting to be traded with reach. "A lot of the higher QAM rate coherent doesn't go very far," says Welch. "16-QAM in true applications is probably a 500km technology." 

This is new for the industry. In the past a 10Gbps service could be scaled to 800 Gigabit system using 80 DWDM wavelengths. The same applies to 100Gbps which scales to 8 Terabit. 

"I'm used to having high-capacity services and I'm used to having 80 of them, maybe 50 of them," says Welch. "When I get to a Terabit service - not that far out - we haven't come up with a technology that allows the fibre plant to go to 50-100 Terabit."

This issue is already leading to fundamental research looking at techniques to boost the capacity of fibre.

PICs 

However, in the shorter term, the smarts to enable high-speed transmission and higher capacity over the fibre are coming from the next-generation DSP-ASICs. 

Is Infinera's monolithic integration expertise, with its 500 Gigabit PIC, becoming a less important element of system design?

"PICs have a greater differentiation now than they did then," says Welch. 

Unlike Infinera's 500Gbps super-channel, the recently announced ASICs use two carriers and 16-QAM to deliver 400Gbps. But the issue is the reach that can be achieved with 16-QAM: "The difference is 16-QAM doesn't satisfy any long-haul applications," says Welch.

Infinera argues that a fairer comparison with its 500Gbps PIC is dual-carrier QPSK, each carrier at 100Gbps. Once the ASIC and optics deliver 400Gbps using 16-QAM, it is no longer a valid comparison because of reach, he says.

Three parameters must be considered here, says Welch: dollars/Gigabit, reach and fibre capacity. "I have to satisfy all three for my application," he says.

Long-haul operators are extremely sensitive to fibre capacity. "I need as much fibre capacity as I can get," he says. "But I also need reach." 

In data centre applications, for example, reach is becoming an issue. "For the data centre there are fewer on and off ramps and I need to ship truly massive amounts of data from one end of the country to the other, or one end of Europe to the other."

The lower reach of 16-QAM is suited to the metro but Welch argues that is one segment that doesn't need the highest capacity but rather lower cost. Here 16-QAM does reduce cost by delivering more bandwidth from the same hardware. 

Meanwhile, Infinera is working on its next-generation PIC that will deliver a Terabit super-channel using DP-QPSK, says Welch. The PIC and the accompanying next-generation ASIC will likely appear in the next two years.

Such a 1 Terabit PIC will reduce the cost of optics further but it remains to be seen how Infinera will increase the overall fibre capacity beyond its current 80x100Gbps. The integrated PIC will double the 100Gbps wavelengths that will make up the super-channel, increasing the long-haul line card density and benefiting the dollars/ Gigabit and reach metrics.

In part two, ADVA Optical Networking, Ciena, Cisco Systems and market research firm Ovum reflect on OFC/NFOEC. Click here