New backbone solution to relieve strain of bandwidth-intensive applications

Alcatel-Lucent introduced a converged IP/Optical backbone network solution designed to relieve the strain on service providers’ core networks caused by the explosive growth of video and other bandwidth-intensive applications.

The new Converged Backbone Transformation solution more tightly integrates IP and optical transport resources and can reduce the number of required network elements, improve efficiencies in power and rack space, simplify network provisioning and fault management, minimize latency, and enhance reliability.

Alcatel-Lucent is introducing intelligent control plane integration between the optical and IP layers, yielding benefits such as rapid service provisioning and increased resiliency. In addition, both optical and IP portfolios are evolving to support 40 Gigabit and 100 Gigabit speeds in the data plane, increasing network capacity. The company is also delivering an integrated network management approach that will provide end-to-end network visibility across both IP and optical domains to the appropriate Network Operation Centers.

The solution offers a range of traffic “grooming” options that increase transport network efficiency, enabling traffic forwarding at the most economical layer in the network. These include lambda (or wavelength)-level, port-level and sub-port-level grooming of IP traffic to enable capacity increases in increments where and when needed and enable core router traffic to be offloaded onto the optical transport network.