What is OTN?
Telecommunications industry and service provider networks must quickly evolve to deal with an explosion of digital traffic driven by multimedia services, mobile applications, social media, VoIP, and cloud computing. Plus, there’s an ever-growing array of bandwidth-hungry applications.
Network traffic used to be all about voice calls carried over circuit-based networks in a predictable network connection between pairs of endpoints. Today, most network traffic is packet-based, generated by a multitude of services and applications in bursty, unpredictable traffic patterns, with widely varying and more stringent demands on bandwidth and data transmission performance.
OTN wraps each client payload transparently into a container for transport across optical networks, preserving the client’s native structure, timing information, and management information. The enhanced multiplexing capability of OTN allows different traffic types—including Ethernet, storage, and digital video, as well as SONET/SDH—to be carried over a single Optical Transport Unit frame.
Because OTN is a fully transparent protocol, adapting existing services is pretty straightforward.
OTN leaves current OSS/BSS solutions intact, utilizes all available tools and automation, and requires little to no retraining. OTN’s cost-effectiveness, ease of implementation, and simplicity offer companies a straightforward, painless solution to evolving network needs.
OTN-based backbones and metro cores offer significant advantages over traditional WDM transponder-based networks, including increased efficiency, reliability, and wavelength–based private services. The IP-over-OTN infrastructure also offers better management and monitoring, reduced hops, increased protection of services, and reduced costs for equipment acquisition. In addition to scaling the network to 100G and beyond, OTN plays a key role in making the network an open and programmable platform, enabling transport to become as important as computing and storage in intelligent data center networking.
OTN is a digital wrapper that provides an efficient and globallyaccepted way to multiplex different services onto optical light paths.
OTN has a number of advantages, including:
- Reduction in transport costs: With multiple clients transported on a single wavelength, OTN provides an economical mechanism to fill optical network wavelengths.
- Efficient use of optical spectrum: OTN facilitates efficient use of DWDM capacity by ensuring consistent fill rates across a network using OTN switches at fiber junctions.
- Determinism: OTN dedicates specific and configurable bandwidth to each service, group of services, or network partition, guaranteeing network capacity and managed performance for each client and no contention between concurrent services or users.
- Virtualized network operations: New virtualization techniques such as Optical Virtual Private Networks (O-VPNs) provide a dedicated set of network resources to a client, independent of the rest of the network.
- Flexibility: OTN networks enable operators to employ the technologies they need now while enabling the adoption of new technologies as business requirements dictate.
- Secure by design: OTN networks ensure a high level of privacy and security through hard partitioning of traffic onto dedicated circuits.
- Robust yet simple operations: OTN network management data is carried on a separate channel, completely isolated from user application data, so settings are much more difficult to access and modify through a client interface port.
Ciena’s 6500 family converges packet, OTN, and flexible WaveLogic Photonics in a single platform to streamline operations and optimize footprint, power, and capacity. With off-board software tools, service providers and enterprises alike can automate services from creation through orchestration and delivery. In addition, Ciena’s 5400 family offers the industry’s first fully modular and reconfigurable switching platform, which enables a practical transition to a converged OTN and Ethernet-based service-enabling infrastructure.
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by Khaled Mokhtar
I am 20 years Wireless / Satcoms Engineer who had to dig into the Optical fiber world since I abandoned during the study of Engineering.
by abdul khaliq
How OTN switching does work? facility provisioning over ODU0 what type of circuit protection can be configured.?
thanks
by ROGELIO
ES MUY INPORTANTE PARA MI ESTA CAPACITACION Y ME GUSTARIA TENER MAS CONOCIMIENTO EN EL RAMO
by khritish chunihara`
this training is very important to enhance the knowledge. i am having in the field experience and this training was making me compact to outcome was very good after this
by Paulina Gomez, Ciena
Hi Carlos, thank you for reaching out and your interest. SDN is a key element if Ciena’s Adaptive Network vision of the ideal network end state that utilizes automation, guided by analytics and intent based policies, to rapidly scale, self-configure, and self-optimize by constantly assessing network pressures and demands. The Adaptive Network enables network providers to optimize their existing infrastructures while incorporating new technologies and ways of working. It’s built on key foundational elements, which enhance network and business outcomes independently, but are a force multiplier when working together. To learn about the Adaptive Network visit: https://www.ciena.com/adaptive-network/. In regards to a paper on OTN implementations over an OPGW network, we do not have one at this time to point you to.
by CARLOS FUENMAYOR
Hope you are well
Two questioms:
Do you have any example or paper of OTN implementations over a OPGW network:?
How much are you using SDN in your solutions?
Thanks for your answers
by Tran Xuan Thanh
please share the eBook
by Anil Yadav
Is Media Converter is OTN Product ?
by Tathagat
Please share the eBook
by Ayinalem Kassa
Please give me kwoledge of otn intallation system
by abdul khaliq choudhry
Like to know what is the role of OTN in Metro PO network and how does it work
by amarendra singh
Difference between otn and osn
by Bo Gowan
Hi Jack, we just a webinar on the topic of OTN and the advantages of converged packet-optical that might be of interest. Here's a link to the on-demand version of the webinar.
http://mynetwork.ciena.com/webinar-gold-in-your-otn-network-reg.html
by Jack Reymundo Guerra
Hello Ciena,
I really interested about all from your services,courses,etc. I work in Telxius ( known as Telefonica International Wholesale Services) and had the opportuinity to work on the Network Operation Center and i could manage the Ciena Equipmens as Ciena MSPP , Broad Band, Ciena 6500 and 5430.
Lately I saw an litlle video course OTN Basics in your website saba.com. I would like to receive courses or documents about OTN due I consider an interesting technology to learn.
regards