11:00 AM -- There'll be no getting away from software-defined networking (SDN) in 2013, especially if you attend any Carrier Ethernet or MPLS-related industry events this year. That much is already clear from the details of such events arriving in my inbox.

But that doesn't mean there won't be plenty worth checking out. The first item that's caught my eye for the early part of the year is the annual European Advanced Networking Test Center AG (EANTC) multivendor interoperability test, which takes place over a three-week period in the independent test lab's facilities in Berlin.

What's particularly interesting is that the EANTC team will be creating a test network that will include OpenFlow and Path Computation Element (PCE) solutions interfacing with non-SDN Carrier Ethernet and MPLS elements. The inclusion of PCE, an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) model that looks to be of particular interest to those building transport networks, is also interesting as it is often overshadowed in SDN architecture discussions by the OpenFlow protocol.

The key findings (but not including any that would be too embarrassing to the participating vendors) of EANTC's test will be presented at the annual MPLS & Ethernet World Congress event in Paris in March, which this year looks to be dominated by SDN topics.

SDN and network virtualization will also be a hot topic at the Ethernet Europe 2013 event in Frankfurt, Germany, in April.

— Ray Le Maistre, International Managing Editor, Light Reading