2022/03/30
Keio University
NEC Corporation
KDDI Research, Inc.
The three organizations, Keio University (President: Kohei Itoh), NEC Corporation (President and CEO: Takayuki Morita; hereinafter "NEC"), and KDDI Research, Inc. (President and CEO: Hajime Nakamura; hereinafter "KDDI Research"), have undertaken the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications' commissioned research project "Research and Development of Innovative Optical Network Technology for a New Social Infrastructure," Technical Subject III "High-efficiency Optical Access Metro Technology" (FY2018–FY2021) (JPMI00316). Through this project, they have researched and developed (hereinafter "this R&D") a technology that enables common monitoring and control of open optical networks composed of transmission equipment from multiple different vendors, and have demonstrated that this makes it possible to build highly reliable optical networks.
Open optical networks are expected to reduce the overall equipment cost of optical networks by allowing for the timely and appropriate introduction of functional modules (e.g., transponders, ROADM functions) with different replacement cycles and update schedules. On the other hand, there were concerns about increased operational costs and reduced reliability, as it was anticipated that ensuring optical signal quality, complicating equipment control, and identifying and recovering from failures would become more difficult.
In this R&D, we established real-time monitoring, multi-vendor control, and high-availability routing technologies. Using a testbed composed of transmission equipment from five domestic and international vendors, we confirmed that automatic failure recovery is possible in the event of optical fiber or transponder failures. This has demonstrated that it is possible to build a highly reliable multi-vendor optical network while suppressing increases in operational costs, paving the way for the future practical application of multi-vendor-compatible optical networks.
This R&D was conducted by the Yamanaka Laboratory at the Keio University Faculty of Science and Technology, NEC, and KDDI Research (hereinafter "the research group").
For the full press release, please see below.