Grotto Networking can provide you with a variety of custom tailored short courses including but not limited to:
This course introduces the emerging optical control plane standards being developed at the OIF, IETF, ANSI's committee T1 and the ITU-T. These standards offer new interoperable approach to controlling optical transport networks. As optical transport networks have grown in capacity (e.g., DWDM) and capabilities (new types of switches) the need to update the control plane for these optical networks has been pressing on equipment vendors and service providers alike. In the past, transport networks were relatively static and typically controlled by a proprietary management system. Element management systems from different vendors did not work together for provisioning end to end circuits or for OA&M. This contributed to higher operating expenses, longer provisioning times, longer restoration times, and longer training time, etc. This course provides an overview of the key protocols in the emerging optical control plane standards, and the functionality provided by these protocols. This functionality includes neighbor discovery, servive discovery, link verification, rapid provisioning, dissemination of reachability information, and dissemination of topology and resource status information. The different interfaces such as UNIs and NNIs and their variants are explained in terms of offered subsets of the basic functionality.
This popular course has been given at OFC 2002-2008 and will be given again at OFC 2009. Shortened versions are available. For an overview white paper on this topic area contact Grotto-Networking via e-mail.
SONET and SDH technologies are actually fairly new technologies, data back to the 1980's, however for many of us they are much less familiar than the older but very widely established technologies of Ethernet and TCP/IP. Part of this stems from the wide deployment of Ethernet and TCP/IP in the enterprise (and also the residence!), while SONET/SDH has been a staple of carrier's backbone network. In this course we teach the fundamentals of SONET/SDH from a data networking perspective with data networking applications in mind. Areas covered include: optical technologies, time division multiplexing techniques, synchronization, layering, performance monitoring, fault management, concatenation, multiplexing, switching and payload mappings. Motivations and examples of each of these areas are given a long with comparisions to analogies, when they exist, in the packet switched networking case.
Reliability, resiliance, and robustness have become increasingly more important to todays communications networks. It seems like a day doesn't go by with a new vendor claim or proposed protocol in this area. To sort the wheat from the chaff in these proposals or claims its important to understand the fundamental concepts underlying the protection and restorations schemes deployed or proposed for various communications networks. This course covers (i) reliability modeling, (ii) the fundamental tradeoffs of timeliness, bandwidth efficiency and robustness, (iii) implementation related trade offs such as complexity and interoperability, (iv) protection restoration and network layers, (v) differences in protection and restoration in packet and circuit switched networks, (vi) linear protection, (vii) ring protection, and (viii) mesh protection. Note that these last three areas are viewed as protection types not network architecture, we group techniques by their fundamental properties as defined (ii), hence under rings we would discuss SONET/SDH style UPSR, BLSR as well as modern p-cycle approaches since they have similar speed and resiliance properties.
Prominent features of both the GMPLS and G.ASON architectures is the use of routing protocols adapted from the connectionless packet switching world (e.g., IP) for optical networks. The first part of this course examines the fundamental properties of routing protocols: (i) discovery, (ii) adjacency establishment and maintenance, (iii) database synchronization, (iv) reliable database updates, and (v) basic path computation techniques. The second part of this course focuses on the extensions needed for optical networks, e.g., shared risk link groups. These are motivated via a quick review of common optical networking deployment scenarios, economics, and customer requirements. Finally, the third part of this course focuses on path computation for optical network. As explained earlier in the course this turns out to be an area where considerable differentiation can be acheived by carriers and vendor alike. We discuss different performance measure for path selection, then discuss a variety of path computation techniques ranging from N-wise diverse route computation to global network optimization.