Alcatel-Lucent unveils converged backbone

Networking firm Alcatel-Lucent has developed a converged IP optical backbone designed to help service providers cope with accelerating demand for network capacity.

Many core networks are struggling to meet peak loads with the growing adoption of high-bandwidth applications such as IP video, hosted services, cloud computing and streaming media, and Alcatel-Lucent hopes to address with its Converged Backbone Transformation (CBT) platform.

The CBT system forms part of Alcatel-Lucent's High Leverage Network strategy, a next-generation, all-IP multiservice infrastructure, and more tightly integrates IP and optical transport resources, which in turn helps optimise the transport network.

"Internet, voice, data and especially video traffic continue to increase, pressuring service providers to find ways to cut the cost of reliably transporting the traffic while simultaneously delivering new services," said Michael Howard, principal analyst at Infonetics Research.

"In a recent Infonetics survey, two-thirds of the service providers responded that they expect to combine their data and transport operations by 2010. Alcatel-Lucent's approach fits service provider goals of efficiently scaling many traffic types in a converged IP and optical architecture, while offloading the core routers to help streamline their core networks."

To accomplish this, Alcatel-Lucent has developed an intelligent control plane integration between the optical and IP layers, and is ramping up its optical and IP portfolios to support 40Gbps and 100Gbps speeds in the data plane.

The company is also developing an integrated network management interface to provide end-to-end network visibility across IP and optical domains to the appropriate Network Operation Centres.

"The status quo of adding more router capacity in the core to keep up with rapidly growing internet traffic simply isn't sustainable for our customers," said Basil Alwan, president of the IP division at Alcatel-Lucent.

"In seizing the opportunity for this core network transformation we find ourselves in a unique and enviable position. With our strong market presence and technology leadership in both IP routing and optical transport, Alcatel-Lucent is ideally placed to help our customers deal with this problem with a unique and highly effective solution."

Alcatel-Lucent said that this approach can reduce the amount of physical networking components required, thereby cutting power consumption and rack space as well as improving latency and reliability.