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Re: SONET/Ethernet clock tolerance




Rich,

Almost all your description about SONET clock tolerance issues seems correct 
to me except just one point about SONET regenerator;

At 11:21 AM -0800 00.3.28, Rich Taborek wrote:
> SONET performs clock tolerance compensation via the manipulation of pointers
> which involves significant modification of the SONET stream. My observation is
> that wherever SONET framing is employed in link with a clock tolerance of +/-100
> PPM that SONET reframing must be performed at any link point where clock
> tolerance compensation is required. After all, this is the same methodology
> employed in a SONET ring where a regenerator is periodically employed to ensure
> the SONET stream meets its +/-4.6 PPM requirements.

The things in a SONET ring are much worse.

SONET regenerator never performs the clock adjustment.  It recovers the clock 
from the received upstream signal, and use it for downstream signal to transmit.
http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/3/ae/public/terminology.pdf
Therefore SONET regenerator has very stringent (you may read it crazy) jitter-
transfer specification and hence is very expensive.

This was reasonable when SONET OC-192 accommodates thousands of 1.5 Mb/s T1 Path 
whose clock are all independent to the others; we didn't want to re-write 
thousands of pointers at each regenerators.  Brief description on this matter 
is in the Backup Foils pp.26-30 (What is SONET?) on my Albuquerque slides.
http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/3/ae/public/mar00/ishida_1_0300.pdf

Here 10 Gigabit Ethernet will require only ONE Path STS-192c in the payload. 
I don't believe re-using expensive SONET regenerator for 10GbE is a good choice 
unless you have already invested in it.

I hope to see that 802.3ae will provide much economical solution for their own 
regenerators or media converters. 

-----------------------------------------
Osamu ISHIDA
NTT Network Innovation Laboratories
TEL +81-468-59-3263  FAX +81-468-55-1282