Customer Spotlight

Intelligent All-Optical
Network Test Bed at CTTC

The Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya is at the forefront of intelligent all-optical network research and has recently chosen Polatis DirectLight for use in its ADRENALINE Test Bed.

The Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya is at the forefront of intelligent all-optical network research and has recently chosen Polatis DirectLight for use in its ADRENALINE Test Bed.

The ADRENALINE acronym is derived from a description of the system i.e. an All-optical Dynamic REliable Network hAndLINg IP/Ethernet Gigabit traffic with QoS (Figure 1). This test bed is an intelligent all optical network consisting of (up to) 14 Optical Connection Controller (OCC) nodes, enabling experiments for disparate topologies. It employs DWDM technology for large transport capacity, along with a distributed Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) based control plane to provide both dynamic and real-time provisioning of end-to-end optical connections between clients and services. A distributed management plane, which combines the standard Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) with the user-friendly eXtensible Markup Language(XML), is also deployed.

Figure 1: Architecture of the ADRENALINE test bed.

The enormous flexibility of ADRENALINE makes it suitable for many applications, some of which include field trials for metropolitan optical networks, design and evaluation of latest state-of-the-art techniques in optical networking and evaluation of the performance of different types of traffic.

The addition of a Polatis 32x32 optical switch tray is part of a project to add a 4th node to the system. ‘This additional node will greatly enhance our capabilities and enables full mesh network applications’ stated Iván Martínez, CTTC’s research engineer with responsibility for running ADRENALINE. Martínez added ‘The automatic protection and dark fiber switching feature incorporated into the Polatis unit will also enable rapid network reconfiguration in response to simulated line failures.’

Utilizing patented DirectLight™ technology, Polatis switches are ideally suited for use in Mesh networking as well as other advanced architectures.  The optional power monitoring and physical layer protection switching capabilities of the matrix allow optimal utilization of the automated control layer, while the dark fiber switching capabilities of the switch provide immediate, full-time availability of alternate network configurations for rapid, automated traffic rerouting and restoration.  Featuring world-class optical performance and full transparency, the Polatis switch accommodates virtually any transmission protocol or line rate, enabling enhanced capabilities to intelligent automated networks.

The CTTC team can offer support to organizations that, for example, are deploying dark fiber and need to conduct field trials with the latest technology or simply aiming to apply advanced networking techniques and would like to test them in a real scenario, e-mail: raul.munoz@cttc.es

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