Polatis to demo SDN-enabled optical circuit switching at ECOC 2013

CAMBRIDGE, UK & ANDOVER, USA: Polatis Inc. the performance leader in all-optical switch technology, will host a live demonstration of a hybrid packet/optical circuit switched software-defined network (SDN) at the European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC). The ECOC exhibition will take place on September 23 to 25 2013 at the ExCeL ICC, London.

Developed jointly with the High Performance Networks Group at the University of Bristol, the SDN-enabled Polatis optical cross-connects will be used to demonstrate the efficiency benefits of hybrid packet-optical circuit switching architectures for dynamic management of large flows in datacentre applications such as virtual machine migration.

The Bristol University team are leading researchers in the extension of SDN protocols to support dynamic reconfiguration of circuit-switched optical network infrastructure, enabling greater efficiency, scalability and flexibility of high-capacity service provision.

"Unified software control of the physical layer is a key requirement for next generation networks", said Professor Dimitra Simeonidou, head of the High Performance Networks Group at the University of Bristol. "Adding SDN support to Polatis optical circuit switches brings dynamic reconfigurability to optical systems and enables us to explore new programmable architectures for efficient, high capacity, telecom and datacentre networks."

OpenFlow is an emerging standard for SDN which can be used to control optical circuit switch (OCS) elements for applications such as router bypass for high capacity data centres, management of dark fibre network connectivity and advanced colourless, directionless and contention-less architectures.