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Home > About Us > News Room > News Releases > New Technology Vastly Improves Network Performance New Technology Vastly Improves Network Performance
November 03, 2006 -- Calgary, AB - Optimum Communications Services, Inc. (OCS) and TRLabs have successfully completed interoperability testing and performance validation for OCS' patent-pending, self-optimizing Adaptive-Mesh network architecture implemented by OCS' Intelligent Transport Network (trademark) (ITN) technology.
"TRLabs' testing and study of the system design has determined that ITN is an advantageous solution for high quality MPLS-based packet transport suitable for data, voice or video services," says Dr. Wayne Grover, TRLabs Chief Scientist Network Systems. Comparing OCS' ITN to conventional packet-switching networks, Dr. Grover notes "Under a significant data load, ITN will exhibit considerably less delay, delay jitter, and packet loss than, for example, Ethernet or Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) transport networks."
OCS' ITN solution provides direct value to telecom service providers, such as wireless carriers, who buy wide-area network capacity from other carriers. For instance, from an OC-768 ring that can be mapped to a single optical wavelength, ITN Adaptive-Mesh can provide protected, non-blocking MPLS connectivity among up to ten 10Gbps (10GbE or OC-192c) customer network access points. To achieve comparable performance using alternative technologies, each of the ten 10Gbps access points would need to be mapped to their dedicated wavelengths, requiring ten wavelengths of optical network capacity. The economic benefits of the 1000% architectural cost-efficiency gain achieved by ITN can be shared with customers, such as mobile operators upgrading their backbone networks to accommodate increasing subscriber traffic volumes. Beneficiaries also include enterprises and consumers - as ITN allows telecom service providers to cost-efficiently support higher speed broadband services and increasingly productive and economical end-user applications.
OCS' ITN hardware consists of the programmable, one telecom rack unit (1U) sized hardware units developed in Phase 1 of the OCS-TRLabs joint R&D project. OCS' program code configures these units, (i.e. ITN nodes) to operate as a distributed MPLS switch system over a wide-area transport network. The real-time control plane running on the ITN nodes performs traffic load pattern adaptive optimization of transport network capacity allocation between the ITN nodes, thereby maximizing the data throughput between the customer equipment (e.g. MPLS routers), connected through ITN.
OCS moved its headquarters and research and development function to Alberta from California in 2005 to work with TRLabs on accelerating development of OCS' ITN technology. In addition to accessing TRLabs hardware engineering, lab facilities, and network testing capabilities, OCS has engaged a number of Alberta-based companies to drive project success, including LogiCan Technologies Inc. (ITN node hardware manufacture), Au-Zone Technologies Inc. (embedded software for ITN), and Rohit Connexion Ltd. (TRLabs member - network management systems for ITN).
About Optimum Communications Services, Inc. (OCS)
www.optimumzone.net
OCS is a wholesale network service provider startup with an internally-developed, patent-pending technology-based competitive advantage in providing cost-and-performance optimized MPLS, SDH/SONET and 1/10G Ethernet based backbone network and broadband VPN solutions for end-user-serving communications service providers and multi-sited corporations. OCS is a member of TRLabs' Industry Associate network of more than thirty start-up and growth phase high-tech companies doing R&D in western Canada.
About TRLabs
TRLabs creates innovative technologies and trains students to enhance ICT expertise and improve Canada's global competitiveness. Labs in Edmonton, Calgary, Saskatoon, Regina, and Winnipeg employ 210. With 51 partner members representing a unique synergy of industry, government, and university, technology and applications research focuses on future network needs and demands in areas such as: data networking; digital media; health; home technologies; network systems; photonics; and wireless communications. In its 20-year existence, TRLabs has trained 840 highly skilled university graduates, created 310 technologies adopted for use by companies, and generated 161 patents issued or filed.
Dr. Wayne Grover serves as Chief Scientist, Networks Systems group at TRLabs. He has 25 years of industry and university experience in the theory, design and operation of 'self-healing' networks that survive physical failures through fast, highly efficient means of self-organized reconfiguration. His theoretical and practical advances are internationally recognized for contributions to restorable network design and operation, fiber optic transmission systems design, and network synchronization, clock distribution and timing jitter control challenges. Dr. Grover is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Alberta, a Fellow of the IEEE, and author of the 2003 book on 'Mesh-based Survivable Networks,' published by Prentice Hall. He is a prolific researcher and inventor with several landmark papers and 38 patents filed or issued on transport networks and technologies.
--Backgrounder--
Validation Statement on OCS’ ITN for MPLS Transport Network Applications
"Validation studies and initial operational testing of the "Adaptive-Mesh" network architecture of OCS’ ITN technology in October 2006 is showing it be an advantageous solution for high quality MPLS based packet transport suitable for data, voice or video services. The internal architecture provides low-delay deterministic (circuit-like) delivery of traffic with an efficient principle for dynamic allocation of bandwidth to sources. Following ingress routing, flows have guaranteed delivery to the corresponding egress node and total flows to any node are inherently matched to the maximum capacity of the corresponding router. In this sense the system is internally non-blocking, loss free, and highly efficient in the use of line capacity. The current ITN hardware setup is based on an ITN hardware node card, interfaced to an Agilent N2X Router tester using MPLS over PPP over HDLC over OC-Nc (POS) interface and operating as a functional emulation of five of the nodes on what will be up to a 10 node ring in the fully developed test system. The basic ITN node hardware prototype is working, demonstrating its data-driven fast internal circuit-switching form of capacity allocation under rapidly varying test case load scenarios. By arranging the ingress router to assign flows for the test setup, and routing flows to traverse through the card’s 5 interfaces, a complete internal OC-N bus of the ITN system concept is realized comprising 4 sources and one destination node. Bidirectional operation will simply add a mirror image of the current test configuration.
Because source nodes rapidly exchange load information with the corresponding destination node out of band in the SONET overheads (72,000 times a second), the possibility of en-route contention is avoided at transiting nodes, because a dynamic bandwidth, dedicated circuit connection is used to transport the data that is buffered at each source node to the destination node. The initial lab evaluation system confirms the ability of the technology to reach 100% utilization of the internal OC-N bus payload capacity, in a non-blocking load-adaptive manner which is internally lossless and circuit-like (up to the ultimate limits of the physically available capacity) between the ITN nodes. Importantly, with ITN the dynamic adjusting of STS-X circuit capacities is re-optimized for every new SONET row period based on data load at sources. This coordination is out of band and does not use the payload bandwidth or cause any loss of payload throughput. The allocation of STS-1 timeslots among circuits between ITN nodes occurs behind the scenes while the full payload capacity of OC-N envelopes is used for transporting data packets.
A significant advantage of ITN over RPR is that packets are stat-muxed and internally routed only once, at the ingress point, and at the ingress rate, and thereafter deterministically delivered in dynamically allocated timeslots to their egress point. This is in contrast to RPR, Ethernet or other purely packet-switched ring where stat muxing and routing occur at every transit node at the full ring rates in addition to at the ingress point to the ring. Under a significant load this means that flows through e.g. Ethernet or RPR transport networks will exhibit considerably greater delay, delay jitter, and packet loss than via ITN. With the novel ITN system architecture, transmission bandwidth is only ever consumed by packets that have assured circuit-type delivery to the corresponding destination node. When packets are ready at the source node, a dedicated circuit of the required number of SONET timeslots is set up for the conveyance of that data. By managing priority and bulk flows, delays and packet loss are very low even when system bandwidth utilization is extremely high. This effectively avoids the usual trade-off between packet loss, jitter, and delay versus bandwidth utilization that characterizes purely stat-muxed packet switched networks, that requires these conventional packet based carrier networks almost always operate at low bandwidth utilization in practice."
Wayne D. Grover, P.Eng., IEEE Fellow
Chief Scientist, Network Systems Research, TRLabs
Professor, Dept. of Elect. & Comp. Eng., University of Alberta
October 30, 2006