On the event of their third quarter meeting, members of the Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF (News - Alert)) initiated two new projects. The first project provides specification for a micro-integrable tunable laser assembly (uITLA) while the second project addresses OSS Control Plane Management. According to OIF, there is a growing need for new form factor for tunable lasers as the industry is moving toward XFP form factor with reduced power dissipation. They also believe that both the project will act as important tools for equipment vendors and carriers to showcase their products and implement control plane technology.

Speaking to the 115 OIF members at the meeting, Dana Cooperson, Practice Leader for Network Infrastructure at analyst firm Ovum (News - Alert), put forth the key technology themes and challenges that factor into the evolution to the next generation, converged packet-optical network. According to her, OIF projects have always enabled accelerated technology adoption cycle citing the widely adopted ‘100G Framework’ as the perfect example and further added, “. The OIF will continue to play a critical role in increasing network and market efficiency.”

The new uITLA project recommends key changes to assembly electrical interfaces, optical and mechanical specifications. To provide seamless integration of specific vendor ‘gold box’ laser on the host PCB limited by space, the uITLA implementation agreement (IA) will deploy an alternate laser solution for ITLA customers. As per the specification, greater than 2X (News - Alert) reduction in the base plate area of the uITLA relative to the ITLA-MSA-1.2 IA is desired.

The new OSS Control Plane Management project will output a framework document that addresses the OSS Control Plane challenges associated with Optical Transport Evolution. Additional challenges related to OSS integration and management of control plane-initiated services will surface as the networks change from TDM to packet and to MPLS-based Transport. These converged networks in turn will give rise to operational challenges. The new project will address these OSS challenges in making operational the TDM control plane including multilayer TDM CP (SONET/SDH, OTN).

The OIF develops and creates Implementation Agreements (IAs) for optical, interconnect, network processing, component, and networking systems technologies for promoting the development and deployment of interoperable networking solutions and services.