The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) announced today plans for a global Software-Defined Networking (SDN) Transport Application Programming Interface (T-API) interoperability demonstration in the fall of 2016. The OIF is partnering with the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), a non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating the adoption of open SDN, to take the testing into carrier labs worldwide and lead the industry towards the wide-scale deployment of commercial SDN. Network virtualization and flexibility to deal with peak traffic events, link failures and network slicing are driving motivations behind the demonstration. Currently the transport layer operates with no awareness of the packet layer above it, so manual intervention is often needed to address issues. By incorporating the T-API, the problems can be corrected automatically through software.

Host carriers for the demonstration include China Telecom, China Unicom, SK Telecom, Telefónica and Verizon. Participating vendors include ADVA Optical Networking, Ciena, Coriant, Fiberhome, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., Juniper Networks, NEC Corporation, Sedona Systems, SM Optics and ZTE. Consulting carriers include Orange and TELUS.  Academic and/or research institution participants include China Academy of Telecommunication Research (CATR) and Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC).

“In the modern operating environment, carriers need to dynamically move capacity to handle quickly changing traffic demands,” said Jonathan Sadler of Coriant and the OIF’s technical committee vice chair and acting networking interoperability chair. “The APIs that are being tested create a new breed of applications. Like so many of the interoperability agreements developed by the OIF, demand from carriers continues to drive the technical direction of the Forum.”

“ONF and the OIF are united in our goal of moving these technical advances into the market for the benefit of network operators and their users,” said Dan Pitt, executive director of the Open Networking Foundation. “We are pleased to extend our longstanding collaboration with the OIF on T-API, leveraging OIF’s specialized optical expertise, and these demonstrations inspire operators and vendors alike to accelerate development and deployment.”

One main focus of the global demonstration is the notification interface – the means for notifying applications that congestion is being observed, triggering moving around of traffic and addition of capacity. Additional use cases based upon the API standards will be clarified during the testing and defined through OIF implementation agreements to provide a common set of requirements. Regional demonstration read-out events will take place in early 2017 and a whitepaper describing the event will be available to the public. Additional information can be found at http://www.oiforum.com/meetings-and-events/2016-oif-sdn-t-api-demo/.

 

About the OIF
Launched in 1998, the OIF is the first industry group to unite representatives from data and optical networking disciplines, including many of the world’s leading carriers, component manufacturers and system vendors. The OIF promotes the development and deployment of interoperable networking solutions and services through the creation of Implementation Agreements (IAs) for optical, interconnect, network processing, component and networking systems technologies. The OIF actively supports and extends the work of standards bodies and industry forums with the goal of promoting worldwide compatibility of optical internetworking products.  Information on the OIF can be found at http://www.oiforum.com.