As many enterprises open branch offices in different geographical locations, cooperation between those branches and departments increasingly relies upon the WAN and backbone network. A network failure may interrupt business operations or even cause great financial losses. In this scenario, reliability and maintenance are essential. What’s more, the WAN and backbone network may traverse IP and OTN domains, making maintenance complicated and fault location inefficient.

Huawei IP & OTN synergy solution combines OTN and IP/MPLS networks to provide interconnection and information services for enterprises using the following synergy technologies:

Traffic synergy

A sharp increase in broadband users results in rapid growth of service traffic on the IP backbone network, which must be expanded and consolidated continuously to meet user requirements. Optical devices can handle traffic on the IP backbone network through the traffic bypass function, reducing the pass-through traffic that the provider (P) routers need to process. This function not only improves the forwarding efficiency, but also conserves ports and bandwidth on the P routers.

Optical devices establish exclusive paths for bandwidth-extensive service traffic between PE routers. Traffic sent from a source PE router bypasses the P routers and reaches the destination PE router directly.

Protection synergy

Protection synergy combines protection mechanisms on the IP layer and transport layer to provide an optimal protection solution. Major protection features include multi-layer network planning tool, static and dynamic shared risk link group (SRLG), intelligent control plane synergy, and hierarchical protection synergy.

Transport devices send SRLG information to IP routers, including information specific to each layer, such as the OTN, optical, and fiber layers. Each IP router calculates and updates the working and protection paths according to the SRLG information received from the transport layer. This ensures that links in the working and protection paths belong to different SRLGs.

O&M synergy

The U2000 is a management system that provides unified management of transport, access, and IP devices, including MSTP, WDM, OTN, microwave, router, switch, PTN, MSAN, DSLAM, FTTx, and firewall devices, as well as services on these devices.

The U2000 implements fast end-to-end service provisioning by using the following functions:

• Service templates: The U2000 provides various service templates such as tunnel templates, L2VPN/L3VPN/VPLS/PWE3 service templates, and QoS policy templates. These templates enable one-stop service parameter configuration for three to six times faster configuration.
• Batch service delivery: This function offers two to three times faster configuration.
• Automatic calculation of static routes: The U2000 calculates static routes and allocates MPLS labels without manual intervention.
• Inter-domain end-to-end service maintenance: E2E service management helps to identify and locate faults accurately.
• One-click IP and OTN switch switching and layered service presentation: Administrators can switch between the IP layer and OTN layer easily to configure services. The relationship between IP and WDM services is displayed clearly on the GUI.

The U2000 helps analyze root causes of alarms generated on the IP network and filters out 85% of invalid alarms to greatly improve the efficiency of IP-related alarms. Additionally, the U2000 can analyze correlated alarms on the IP and OTN layer and identify the IP links affected by alarms on the OTN layer.

Huawei designed the IP & OTN synergy solution for enterprise backbone networks. In this solution, the OTN uses automatically switched optical network (ASON) technology to dynamically adjust bandwidth according to Ethernet traffic volume and support long-distance transmission. The routers on the IP network provide differentiated service and QoS guarantee according to the IP precedence or MPLS EXP priorities in service packets. The OTN and IP layers collaborate to provide high-quality, high-reliability, and easy-to-manage "Converged, Easy, Cloud" network service.