With €65m of funding allocated, the 100 Gigabit Ethernet Transport (100GET) project is divided up into five sub-projects, each being lead by a major European telecoms company. Four projects, which started in September 2007 and will run for three years, are being lead by systems vendors — Alcatel-Lucent, ADVA Optical Networking, Ericsson, and Nokia Siemens Networks. The fifth project, lead by Spanish incumbent Telefónica, kicked off in October 2008, and will run until December 2010. The diverse nature of the sub-projects highlights the fact that there are many technological issues in 100 GbE networking to be resolved.
100GET-AL
With Alcatel-Lucent Germany as sub-project leader, the 100GET-AL consortium has two major objectives. The first is to develop flexible control plane solutions for 100 GbE packet networks to enable flexible, cost effective network operation and end-to-end quality of service (QoS) provisioning across multiple layers and domains. The second activity is to investigate promising electronic and optical technology options for low-cost transponders using 56 Gbaud DQPSK as the modulation format.
100GET-E3
Nokia Siemens Networks Germany is co-ordinator of this sub-project, and has recently added several Finnish institutions to the roll call. The project title, abbreviated from the phrase "end-to-end carrier-grade Ethernet", indicates the key objective — to develop networking aspects of 100 GbE, particularly for multi-layer and multi-domain routing, grooming, and provisioning. On the physical side, the project partners plan to assess the feasibility of different modulation formats, with a preference for PM-QPSK with coherent detection, and to build a proof-of-concept FPGA demonstrator to show a scalable network processor architecture operating at 100 Gbit/s.
100GET-METRO
Lead by German metro DWDM equipment maker ADVA, this initiative aims to evaluate and test a cost-effective 100 Gbit/s transceiver prototype that meets the particular requirements of metro and regional area networks. The project partners, which include optical software company VPIsystems, will use numerical simulations to investigate the robustness of different modulation formats to fibre impairments, including higher order effects like 2nd order polarization mode dispersion (PMD) and chromatic dispersion slope. The partners also plan to develop a tunable chromatic dispersion compensator and investigate the feasibility of electronic dispersion compensation techniques.
100GET-ER
Co-ordinated by Ericsson, this sub-project will also focus on metro area networks, covering all aspects of 100 GbE technology, from networking architectures to system and component level implementations. The project partners are keeping an open mind on which modulation format to use: orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), sub-carrier modulation (SCM), and multi-level phase shift keying (N-PSK) are all under consideration. On the components side, one target is to develop high-speed analogue-digital converters (ADCs), which are not currently available commercially.
100GET-ES
Just off the starting blocks, this sub-project plans to focus on metro/access networking requirements for 100 GbE, in particular the specifications for an aggregation node that combines ten 10 GbE interfaces into a single 100 GbE output. By the end of the project work, Telefónica and its partners hope to demonstrate a working aggregation node prototype and validate the 100 GbE functionality using the GMPLS test bed at the Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC), and a metropolitan optical fibre ring in Madrid. Work packages include integrated photonic components for a 100 Gbit/s coherent receiver, algorithms for efficient and dynamic traffic aggregation, and control plane functions for efficiently controlling the access/aggregation node.
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