Calient Networks to ship industry's first 50-millisecond restoration feature in OOO mesh networks.

Calient Networks, a provider of intelligent, all-photonic switching systems and software, has announced that it will begin shipping the industry's first 50-millisecond restoration features for all-optical (OOO) shared mesh networks with its DiamondWave photonic switches this summer. KDDI Group of Japan completed extensive testing of this performance feature--dubbed Smart Shared Mesh, or SSM--validating that it meets KDDI's mandatory restoration guarantees.

Optical mesh networks are highly desirable due to their ability to reduce network build, upgrade and protection costs. Until now, metro carriers have largely been unwilling or unable to migrate from costly interconnected SONET rings to capitalize on these mesh network savings, because such networks could not reliably restore links within 50 milliseconds. With Calient's SSM software, these configurations can now restore network traffic, end-to-end, around a failure within 50 milliseconds and offer protection equivalent to the more expensive SONET ring configuration.

"Mesh networks modeled with our customers show a 30-40% savings on optical bandwidth costs by eliminating stranded bandwidth on portions of rings that are not heavily used, and by eliminating the 50% of ring bandwidth held in standby for protection," said Charles Corbalis, CEO and co-founder of Calient Networks. "An additional benefit our customers identified is the ability to grow networks in a modular fashion based on customer demands, rather than bearing the capital costs for full ring deployment to accommodate the first one or two customer locations. It is very difficult to predict where to deploy rings and specific drop locations on those rings, whereas mesh networks completely avoid this problem."

SSM dramatically reduces notification and detection times by leveraging standard GMPLS functions and the near-instantaneous switching speeds of transparent OOO networks. While previous mesh restoration approaches typically required several hundreds of milliseconds, SSM-enabled failure detection and secondary path activation occur in sub-milliseconds.

"50-millisecond mesh network restoration demonstrates the fruit of our efforts to introduce GMPLS networking standards into our future network, and reduces the capital cost of growing and integrating our optical networks," said Dr. M. Suzuki, Executive Director of KDDI R&D Laboratories, Inc. in Japan. "Calient has also been very helpful in introducing GMPLS implementation knowledge and support to our other network equipment providers."

"This new capability is the result of breakthroughs enabled by Calient expertise in GMPLS protocols, signaling system interoperability, and ultra-rapid, ultra-dense switching systems," added Mr. Corbalis. "Smart Shared Mesh and GMPLS protocols such as OSPF-TE, LMP and GRE(a) have been demonstrated to bring powerful benefits to carriers who need to dramatically reduce the cost of metro network switching and transport, and to lower the cost of SONET protection without compromise in restoration speed or integrity."

(a) In 2001, Calient became the first optical switch vendor to release a full signaling software stack based on GMPLS. The company has been a leader in testing, implementing and trialing GMPLS protocols such as Open Shortest Path First--TE, Link Management Protocol (LMP) and Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE).

Calient Networks is a provider of intelligent all-optical switching systems and GMPLS networking software that help service providers reduce the cost of scaling their optical network infrastructure. Calient's award-winning DiamondWave switching system and GMPLS-powered networking innovations provide a seamless migration path that is non-disruptive to legacy operations, highly cost-effective, and an enabler to revenue-generating optical services. Calient is shipping its DiamondWave systems in configurations ranging from 32x32 to 256x256 to carrier networks worldwide. The company is headquartered in San Jose, California. Additional engineering and manufacturing operations are located in Santa Barbara, California, while MEMS design and fabrication operations are located in Ithaca, New York.