ONTC PRISM Newsletter

A warm welcome from the Editorial desk of the ONTC’s newsletter “Prism”. It is our pleasure to bring to you this third edition of PRISM – ONTC’s quarterly newsletter. The industry is moving towards two interesting trends, of consolidation and new business models. Providers and vendors are both adopting new business models as well as new technologies that will have a significant impact The current month focuses on carrier class technologies for packet based telecommunication networks. We have in this issue a good fit between academia and industry, covering various aspects of packet backbones that are making up much of transport networks. The impact of transport networks is important from the larger telecommunication business perspective. The industry just concluded the IEEE 802 Standards’ Plenary in San Diego. The next 802 plenary will be held in Dallas, in November. It will be encouraging to see more academics participate in the .1 and .3 sessions. The ITU study group meets next on Oct 18-22 in Geneva. In this issue of Prism we bring to you 3 articles on a wide range of topics. The first article is by Nurit Spreecher and Yacov Weingarten from Nokia Siemens Networks who describe in detail the working of the emerging Ethernet standard of MPLS-TP. The MPLS Transport Profile technology is being heralded by vendors and providers as the new way to transport Ethernet across large networks achieving low-cost and making much use of the existing MPLS infrastructure. The authors describe the work in the standards, the technological manifestations and operational issues pertaining to MPLS-TP The second article describes the other alternate technology for Carrier Ethernet transport. The article written by David Allan, (Ericcson) Peter Ashwood-Smith, (Huawei) Nigel Bragg, (Ciena) János Farkas, (Ericcson) Don Fedyk, (Alcatel-Lucent) Mick Seaman, Paul Unbehagen (Alcatel-Lucent) talks for the new 802.1as emerging standard on shortest path bridging. The Shortest Path Bridging or SPB technology gives a significant edge to PBBTE networking and has been explained in sufficient detail in the article. The authors point out to a forthcoming longer article on the same topic in the Sept issue of IEEE Communications Magazine. The third article is by Mohit Chamania, Admela Jukan, Oscar Gonzales de Dios, Javier Jimenez Chico on offloading excess IP traffic with optical bypass. The article is important to providers from an opex savings perspective and gives a new direction to optical networking research, especially making them more relevant to IP/MPLS networks. The article paves a way to a more pragmatic view of IP over WDM optical networks. As you are aware the editorial desk does highlight events, call for papers and new standards work – all of which would be relevant information for our readers. So please do send in any such information that you would like to see online for the next issue of Prism! We also do hope readers would send in their thoughts on how to make Prism better – we would be happy to publish their messages even if all of these cannot be adopted at the same time! We invite prospective authors send articles of up to 4 pages (single column, 10 point font, with all one-inch margins) to [email protected]. The deadline for reception of articles is Sept 30, 2010 for the next issue of Prism. On behalf of the TAB we are thankful to the IEEE Communication Society as well as to the ONTC officers Byrav, Suresh, Admela and Dominic who have supported us in making this newsletter happen. It is our hope that the newsletter would bring the community together and identifying areas of growth and common interest.