TITAN: A Flagship Optical Access Platform for the Next Decade
Wang Xinsheng, Han Jing
ZTE Corporation
Telecom operators worldwide are working on bandwidth promotion. New businesses and trends are continually springing up, and booming OTT services are greatly affecting telecom operation. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the competition is among different industries and that services and networks tend to be converged.
Video has become a basic broadband service and will gradually burst out its potentials. In the next decade, traffic growth will accelerate greatly, there will be an explosion of service demands, increasingly diverse services and application scenarios, and video traffic will become dominant. Big video service will account for above 80% of total network traffic in the future, and higher requirements will be placed on network architecture and bearer mode. Accordingly, alternations have to be made on network devices to adapt to changing situations
Based on its deep understanding on the ICT industry, ZTE, as leader in FTTx, has released its TITAN, the industry’s first flagship full-scenario optical access platform oriented to 100G PON and network re-architecture. TITAN boasts the most advanced architecture, the largest capacity, and the strongest capability, fully meeting the application needs in the next decade.
Largest Capacity, Highest Integration, and Strongest Access Capability
■ Largest capacity: TITAN has a switching capacity of 28.8T, four times that of other vendors’ highest level in the industry.
■ Highest integration: TITAN is the industry’s first to support 16-port 10G PON and Combo PON access, and is the first to be tested and applied. It is also the industry’s first to support 16-port 25G PON and 4-port 100G PON high-density accesses.
■ Strongest access capability: TITAN provides up to 36 service slots. Under the same bandwidth condition, it provides four times as much as user access capacity (or the number of access users). TITAN is used to significantly reduce the number of device types and NEs, and hence to simplify networking and lower TCO.
Industry’s Highest 400G Backplane Slot Bandwidth
TITAN provides a slot bandwidth of 400G, which is twice that of other vendors’ highest level. It supports 100G/25G PON non-blocking access, meeting the need of large-scale 100G PON commercial deployment.
Industry’s First to Release Symmetrical 100G PON Prototype
TITAN provides 12-mode on-demand access on the same platform, supporting three generations of PON technologies (EPON/GPON, 10G PON, and 100G PON) as well as three technical systems (GPON, EPON, and PtP), which meets the requirements of smooth evolution from GPON to 10G PON and then to 100G PON, and allows optical terminals to be deployed on-demand. Large-scale 100G PON deployment will be supported in the future by adding cards and upgrading software. This can greatly extend equipment lifecycle and reduce network evolution and upgrade costs.
In January 2017, ZTE launched the industry’s first symmetrical 100G PON prototype, and verified symmetrical single-wavelength 25G and four-wavelength 100G PON systems in a NG-PON demonstration network.
Industry’s First to Support 16-Port High-Density 10G PON and Combo PON
Combo PON innovatively integrates GPON optical module, 10G PON optical module, and WDM1r in the same PON port. This allows a single board to be compatible with two-generation PON technologies and to support on-demand configuration for smooth evolution.
ZTE’s all-in-one Combo PON enables a single board to be compatible with both GPON and 10G PON technologies. It supports smooth technology upgrade, on-demand optical terminal deployment, and flexible bandwidth provision. It also extends equipment lifecycle, reduces the cost and complexity of network upgrade, and facilitates fast network deployment and service provisioning.
ZTE’s Combo PON solution has the following advantages:
■ No need to deploy new 10G PON OLT, rack, WDM1r combiner and ODF, and lots of cost savings in equipment room and deployment
■ No additional insertion loss that is introduced and no change on the existing ODN network
■ Its output optical power is the same as that of GPON. The upgrade of OLT line cards and bandwidth has no impact on normal operation of existing ONUs. The existing GPON terminals can be fully utilized without any change to existing management and maintenance mode. This protects operator investment and increases network value.
The Combo PON solution is not only suitable for the upgrade from GPON to 10G PON, but also applicable in newly-built PON scenarios to quickly attract new users. It requires no prior planning, and optical terminals with different technologies can be deployed and accessed as desired. Users can be upgraded without any change to OLT. Also, there is no adjustment to ODN when it is deployed.
In an upgrade scenario, Combo PON can save 60% of the site space, 50% of the line card types/spare parts, and 26% of CAPEX. In a new deployment scenario, Combo PON can save 40% of CAPEX as compared to newly-built GPON and XG-PON.
Industry’s First OAN and OTN Convergence
The traditional optical network has multiple layers with many intermediate nodes. Its service transport involves many hops and multi-layer convergence, which may lead to packet loss and network latency, and thus seriously affect user experience especially in big video and 5G bearing scenarios.
TITAN supports OTN. OTN sinks down to the access equipment room with a very small cost, so that the transport layer can be converged with the access layer. OLT only needs one uplink hop to connect with the data center (DC) without going through too many intermediate devices and network layers. This reduces the number of IP routing hops at the package layer, lowers network delay, and increases transmission efficiency.
TITAN supports built-in OTN uplink, so it needs less intermediate links on the network. This saves network resources such as uplink interfaces, optical interfaces, and pipes. TITAN also enables unified and flexible management and maintenance of the transmission and access parts, which significantly reduces OPEX. Compared to a stand-alone OTN device, TITAN reduces 25% of the footprint occupation, 30% of the power consumption, and 50% of CAPEX.
Oriented to DC-Centralized Network Re-Architecture for Smooth Migration to SDN
TITAN adopts a fully-distributed non-blocking architecture to ensure the reliability of service resources, service processes and systems. The control plane and forwarding plane are completely separated and do not affect each other. TITAN supports end-to-end flexible network slicing. Each network slice has its independent control plane, forwarding plane and resources to ensure high security and reliability, and ensure that services do not affect each other. In this way, different service requirements can be met at a most appropriate cost, without slowing down equipment performance.
TITAN uses one-level access to replace the original two-level (BNG and OLT) access control to achieve convergence of the access layer and the BNG forwarding plane. This simplifies network layers and structure. TITAN provides a large-capacity virtual resource pool to meet the need of DC-centralized network re-architecture, so that different application scenarios can access the same platform. TITAN can serve as the leaf node under EDC spine-tree architecture to enable cloudized optical access resources. Moreover, TITAN supports VXLAN and Netconf/YANG, and can be controlled by a SDN controller. TITAN implements unified service control, unified service distribution, and automatic service configuration under the control of the SDN controller.
To adapt to the trends of ultrafast, cloudized, and convergent access networks, ZTE’s TITAN platform provides the industry’s most advanced architecture, the highest capability, the largest capacity, and the most complete applications. It is a flagship innovative optical access platform designed to meet the access network development and evolution in the next decade. Since its release, TITAN has drawn great attention in the industry and has led the industry in thinking more about technical development and network deployment at the access layer. Based on the TITAN platform, ZTE offers a complete range of FTTx products and solutions to help operators select flexibly and deploy them on-demand.