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Next Gen SDH
Next Gen SDH
The "legacy" view was triggered by the rapid growth in basic Ethernet
services, initially driven by the perceived low price of Ethernet services and the
deployment of Ethernet-specific equipment. But as service complexity grew, from
point-to-point Ethernet to virtual private networks (VPNs), operators found it
progressively harder to cope with operations, administration and maintenance
(OAM) issues while maintaining adequate margins.
Two main factors contributed to this change of operators' attitudes towards
SDH. First, they experienced that by deploying Ethernet products, originally
designed for enterprise applications, even though capital costs were low but both
operating costs and downtime turned out to be unsatisfactory in real networks.
As a result, operators were forced to turn to the robust SDH systems, based on
the carrier-class features and excellent management capabilities.
Second, due to rising demand for data services, SDH vendors responded
by adding data-friendly and Ethernet-specific functions to their SDH platforms,
while at the same time reducing the cost and size of the equipment. These new
capabilities have been designed to meet standards for enhanced data
networking.
Alongside this activity, changes also took place in the network core. Due
to growing need to reduce the number of transit routers in IP core networks, so
that to improve cost and performance, encourages operators to bypass more of
the IP core with switched SDH transport. Fortunately, SDH vendors saw the need
for more responsive core networks. As a result, they built on work emerging from
the packet-data community to automate and distribute the control of switching
functions, while - again - greatly reducing the size and cost of equipment.
Studies by industry analysts show that the largest and fastest growing
area in the optical-systems market lies in next-generation SDH platforms
designed for data services in metro applications. These are known by various
acronyms, depending on the exact mixture of functions across Layers 1, 2 and 3.
For example:
Two key factors have made these three schemes a particular success. First,
given the transparency of the installed base of SDH, only edge or termination
equipment needs to be enabled with the new features. Second, all of the features
have been proven to work across vendor boundaries. Further enhancements are
appearing that relate to cost reduction for access connections, and to Layer 2
aggregation/switching for packet traffic. The extent of these improvements differs
between vendors, and between SDH and SONET.