One side of two-sided packet optical/optical packet plan
Cisco this week unveiled a transport system for service provider networks that is designed to help them better support packet and IP-based services, like video, mobility and cloud computing. Legacy transport infrastructures based on time-division multiplexing – like SONET/SDH — cannot support this type of traffic efficiently, Cisco says.
Cisco’s new Carrier Packet Transport (CPT) system is designed to inject the efficiencies of packet switching into the reliability and familiar OA&M of a TDM-based transport system. It is comprised of six-rack unit and two-rack unit models, and a satellite device, and is targeted at metro networks. CPT supports MPLS-Transport Profile (MPLS-TP), Ethernet with QoS and VLAN capabilities, and optical transport and reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexers.
The MPLS-TP capability essentially brings MPLS traffic engineering and QoS capabilities from the packet world to transport networks. In addition, it is designed to provide end-to-end OA&M and protection switching.
MPLS-TP will allow the CPT to interoperate with Cisco’s MPLS-enabled routers, like the ASR 9000 and CRS-3. So MPLS label switched paths defined by the routers ostensibly will be mapped to the “service aware” optical transport network constructed with CPT.
The CPT network will also allow service providers to provision traditional SONET/SDH-based services like leased lines and wavelengths in addition to newer services, like HD video, cloud computing, mobile backhaul and point-to-point and multipoint Ethernet.
CPT is an optical transport system with packet-optimized enhancements vs. a packet system – like a router – with optical enhancements, such as IP-over-DWDM router interfaces. As optical transport networks, which have been widely installed in service provider networks for decades, take on more packet-friendly capabilities, there is the possibility that service providers may slow their purchase of router ports. This is prompting router vendors like Cisco, Juniper and Alcatel-Lucent to buck up their optical capabilities, either by offering a packet-optimized transport system (like CPT); adding optical capabilities to their router ports (like IPoDWDM); or both.
CPT is Cisco’s metro optical transport offering for those service providers needing packet on optical vs. optical on packet.
CPT is currently in field trials with several service providers and is scheduled to be available in the first quarter of 2011.
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