TOKYO -- Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (TSE: 9432) has succeeded in adding the operation, administration, maintenance and provisioning (OAM&P) information to the standard LSI for 10 Gigabit Ethernet. The reliability of the Ethernet network is improved by mounting this LSI on an optical transceiver module. It had been assumed that applying Ethernet, a general-purpose LAN technology, to long-distance networks would be difficult in terms of reliability. Therefore, NTT adopted Inter-frame Link Signaling (ILS*1) technology, which inserts the optical network OAM&P information between the inter-frame gaps of the Ethernet frames, and was thereby able to achieve a reliability comparable to that of SDH/SONET*4, a general-purpose technology for WANs*2 or MANs*3.

Ethernet service with ILS functions has already been introduced. To spread the service more widely, the module can be mounted on general network equipment, such as switches, routers, and media converters, by adding the ILS functions to the standard LSI for 10 Gigabit Ethernet on a detaching-type optical transceiver module. Therefore, it is possible to construct a large-area Ethernet network with ILS functions for monitoring transmission quality with the optical fiber, finding defect locations in the optical network, and changing lines because of failures.

NTT Group