The first functional demonstration of optical virtual concatenation as a technique for achieving Terabit networking

The optical virtual concatenation (OVC) function of The Terabit LAN was demonstrated for the first time at the iGrid 2005 workshop in San Diego, California. The TERAbit-LAN establishes a lambda group path (LGP) for an application where the number of lambdas/L2 connections in a LGP can be specified by the application. Each LGP is logically treated as one end-to-end optical path, so during parallel transport, the LGP channels have no relative latency deviation. However, optical path diversity (e.g. restoration) can cause LGP relative latency deviations and negatively affect quality of service. OVC hardware developed by NTT compensates for relative latency deviations to achieve a virtual bulk transport for the Electronic Visualization Laboratory’s (EVL) Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment application.