RE: 10GE data rate and OAMP issues

[Roy Bynum <Roy.Bynum@xxxxxxxx>]

Bill,

I am not sure where you are having interoperability problems at the
SONET/DWDM level. The SONET OAMP byte definition standard is in
BellCore GR253. The DWDM optical wavelength grid standard has been
defined by ITU. SDH is non-North America standard developed by ITU
after SONET was developed.  There are some issues with attempting to
use the same interfaces with both SONET and SDH transport systems.
Those issues are being addressed outside of OIF.  

I have had many conversations with the MCIW representatives to OIF.
(They are part of the same organization that I am in.) From what I can
gather of OIF, it is actually an attempt by various vendors to alter
the existing optical transport technology in ways that they can profit
it more than they currently can. This is the same thing that I found
at SIF when I was attending that. Most of what these people are
proposing are proprietary solutions to issues that I and others in
the industry have already addressed. The biggest issues are
inter-service functionality between the various carriers, not
interoperability of the transport protocols. OIF and SIF are no where
near being as specific task focused as IEEE 802.3 is. The 802.3 WG
will be much better able to define and make sure of an interoperable
standard than OIF or SIF.

Things like Cisco's DPT might leverage the fiber plant to provide some
cost savings. Other things like the proposed "SONET Lite" or "SDL"
provide so little bandwidth advantage that the additional cost of
implementation is not worth it. With the advent of SONET/SDH shared
bandwidth rings running mapped 802.3 with VLANs, I don't think that DPT
will see much market advantage, particularly since Cisco is so late with it.

I was involved with the original OC3/STM4 POS interface development. I
had an OC3/STM4 POS interface in an international system several years
ago. That interface was one of the reasons that Cisco was picked as
the prime data transport vendor for the Avantel project in Mexico. The
only consistent issue between the POS interfaces and the SONET/SDH
transport systems has been the use of line timing for sync instead of
an external stratum clock source. That issue is addressed by turning
off the path sync alarms on the provisioned SONET/SDH transport systems.
I do not see any problems for a SONET/SDH version of 10GbE.

People that use the existing GbE over MAN and WAN systems will have to
come up with their own proprietary methods of doing operational
maintenance and performance monitoring. There are no "hooks" or
"digital optical service overhead" provided in the existing GbE for
that functionality. Long term, GbE is going to be very expensive to
maintain over MAN and WAN systems. As the GbE MAN and WAN
installations age they will require a lot of manual intervention and
"maintenance outages" to remain operational. As the users start using
more 7X24X365 time critical applications, the service outages of GbE
MANs and WANs will become unacceptable. These are issues that
end-system data service providers and vendors have never had to deal
with before. This is an issue that HSSG does have to address in 10GbE.

Thank you,
Roy Bynum
MCI WorldCom




Date:     Wed Jun 23, 1999  8:51 am  CST
Source-Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 10:49:11 -0400
From:     Bill.St.Arnaud
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TO:       nuss
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          MBX: nuss@xxxxxxxxxx
TO:     * Roy Bynum / MCI ID: 424-5935
TO:       HSSG_reflector
          EMS: INNERMAIL / MCI ID: 208-7612
          MBX: stds-802-3-hssg@xxxxxxxx
Subject:  RE: 10GE data rate and OAMP issues
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>
> Roy:
> I wanted to get your expert opinion on a few issues that would be of
> interest to me as we go forward in the standard:
>
> 1) do you really believe that we need to support all the WAN OAMP
> features in 10GE?  I would rather prefer a light-weight 10ge protocol
> that guarantees the lowest cost in the LAN, but make sure that it can be
> wrapped easily into a WAN envelope to support all the WAN features.

As far as I know in the SONET/DWDM world there does not yet exist any OAMP
standards.  These are all proprietary to the various manufacturers.  Yes,
there does exist numerous bytes in the SONET header for signalling of
protection switching, etc.  But interoperability at the transport level
remains a challenge, never mind OAMP interoperability.  The Optical Internet
Forum (OIF) has been working very hard to develop standards in this area.

In my opinion it would be unwise at this time for HSSG to venture into this
area as so there so many complexities and conflicting priorities.

Traditional carriers have very demanding requirements for OAMP which may be
significantly more stringent than that required for non-traditional carriers
who may want to deploy low cost medium haul GbE links.  I don't know of a
single traditional carrier who plans to deploy native GbE on medium or long
haul links.  I suspect traditional carriers, in most cases, will map 10GbE
to SONET for long haul (and even short haul) applications where they can
take advantage of  well known OAMP tools.  A number of vendors are already
offering products that map GbE ( and soon 10GbE) to SONET

Non-traditional carriers such as regional networks, ISPs, etc have 2
choices:

1. Carrying GbE on data transparent networks and using OAMP tools at the
optical level (a couple of products are already on the market in this area)

2. Carrying native GbE on dark fiber and using proprietary OAMP techniques
combined with SNMP

Bill


>
> 2) at the last meeting, Paul Bottorff as well as Mike Salzman presented
> approaches to a serial 10GE standard based on scrambling as opposed to
> block coding.  Both of these could be used for a low-cost serial LAN
> standard, and wrapped into WAN envelopes like SONET to provide WAN OAMP
> features.  The 10GE data rate would have to be kept to around 9.6 Gb/s
> to make that possible at the lowest cost.  Presumably, that would
> accelerate the acceptance of 10GE in the WAN.
>
> 3) Alternatively, we could propose to allow for additional control
> fields in the 10GE standard that duplicate the functions most important
> for WAN apps.  This may be the cleanest solution, but it will require
> 802.3 to venture into an area that it has not worried about before...
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> Martin