The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) announced today that its newly elected board of directors met for the first time at its November 16, 2000 quarterly meeting. The board of directors oversees the OIF working groups in achieving the objectives of the Optical Internetworking Forum.

New Working Group

The sub-working group of Carrier companies, a part of the Architecture Working Group, has announced its intent to become a separate OIF working group. The Carrier companies formed an ad hoc group in May 2000 to assist in the development of the User Network Interface (UNI) 1.0. and has since been recognized for its long term value to OIF and other standards bodies. A permanent status as an official working group will allow the Carrier company members to take on other projects within OIF. The group will present its charter at the next OIF technical meeting scheduled for January 2001.

The Carrier group's document, titled Carrier Optical Services Framework and Associated Requirements for UNI, has been forwarded to ITU to assist in ITU's standardization work on Automatic Switched Optical Networks (ASON). The document is intended to provide a framework and high-level requirements to guide OIF's work on the UNI 1.0 technical specification.

Technical Specifications

OIF members also continued work on the requirements for a number of technical documents currently in progress. The OC-768 task groups made significant progress towards defining requirements for electrical interfaces and very short reach optical interfaces. Specifically, the definition of typical usage scenarios for very short reach optical interfaces at OC-768. Also defined were a common set of signals to interface between integrated circuit (IC) blocks to assist the industry in focusing energy on a fewer number of IC designs. Addressed in detail were interfaces from the framer IC to serializer/deserializer ICs and framer ICs to the link layer IC.

New Board Members

The newly elected members of the board of directors include Adam Dunstan, vice president of technology at Avici Systems - OIF president and chairman; Sid Chaudhuri, director of network architecture at Tellium - OIF vice president; Carol Sensale-Aiello, vice president of network management at Iris Labs - OIF treasurer and secretary; Andrew Greenfield, solutions manager at Cisco Systems - OIF vice president of marketing; Robert Tkach, chief technical officer at Celion Networks - OIF board member; Sam Halabi, member of the office of the CTO at Extreme Networks - OIF board member; and Mike Ahdieh, senior manager, optical internet architecture at Nortel Networks - OIF board member.

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