Microsemi Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Microchip Technology Inc, announced its collaboration with China Telecom Beijing Research Institute to define and develop next-generation optical transport solutions to meet the stringent requirements of 5G.
China Telecom the Next-Generation Optical Transport Network Forum (NGOF) consortium formed to drive industry collaboration and technological innovations to define converged optical transport network (OTN) which meet the needs of 5G deployments.
As part of this collaboration, Microsemi is bringing to market the DIGI-G5, the newest member of its award-winning DIGI OTN processors, supporting new 5G optimised architecture that enables the stringent synchronisation, latency and network slicing requirements being placed on optical networks to support 5G deployments.
5G’s variety of use cases will impose new requirements like network slicing, stringent latency and timing synchronisation on the underlying optical transport networks. With 25G, 50G and 100Gbps port rates planned for 5G remote radio heads, the traffic flow from the radio to the mobile edge will dramatically increase.
With the promise of up to 50x lower end-to-end latency, the optical transport network will play a critical role in enabling ultra-reliable low latency communication (uRLLC) applications such as autonomous vehicles. New architectures leveraging hard traffic isolation will further enhance the business opportunities network slicing is set to bring for mobile operators.
“China Telecom plans to be the pioneer in both 5G commercial service and 400G OTN network commercial deployments. A mobile-optimised converged metro, multiservice and cloud-based OTN transport network is critical to both initiatives,” said Zhang Chengliang, vice president, China Telecom Beijing Research Institute. “The availability of Microsemi’s DIGI-G5 will help the industry deliver a new generation of OTN equipment to enable the 5G era.”
DIGI-G5 enables the 5G era
In response to the 5G challenges, Microsemi’s new 5G optimised architecture of the DIGI-G5 reduces the total latency for single hop close to 1 microsecond. In addition, the DIGI-G5 integrates close to two terabits of on-chip ODUk switching for hard traffic isolation and grooming in support of network slicing.
With original equipment manufacturers looking to upgrade their platforms to meet Precision Time Protocol’s (PTP’s) Class C requirements, the DIGI-G5 delivers best-in-class nanosecond level time stamping accuracy and provides mechanisms to carry critical timing information over the OTN network.
“As a market leader in OTN processors powering packet optical transport networks world-wide, we are focusing our investments to enable service providers to leverage economy of scale and realise operational efficiencies by extending OTN from their metro networks to the access as the packet optical topology for 5G transport,” said Babak Samimi, vice president and business unit manager for Microsemi’s Communications business unit.
“As a founding member of NGOF along with China Telecom, Microsemi is innovating and optimising OTN for mobile applications and DIGI-G5 is bringing together the critical pieces like synchronisation, latency, and network slicing needed for 5G.”
Microsemi’s DIGI-G5 offers differentiating features and innovations to support the 5G era:
- New OTN 3.0 rates, enabling flexible (FlexO) and fractional 100G+ transmission
- Comprehensive Ethernet support including 25GE, 50GE and 100GbE
- Close to 1 microsecond datapath latency
- Supports hard traffic isolation and slicing over OTN
- High precision nanosecond level IEEE 1588 PTP timestamping accuracy
- Integrated G.HAO bandwidth-on-demand processing for OTN switching networks closer to the access
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