Hello everyone!
This post will share with you the background of ASON operation in the WDM system.
Background and Advantages
Compared with a traditional WDM network, an ASON-empowered WDM network has advantages in service configuration, bandwidth utilization, and protection.
Service configurations are complex, and it is time-consuming to expand system capacity and provision services.
Bandwidth utilization is low and inefficient. For example, on a ring network, half of the bandwidth is always vacant.
Limited protection modes are applicable, among which the self-healing protection has poor performance.
Huawei developed ASON to help carriers to meet these challenges. ASON enhances the network connection management and fault recovery capabilities by introducing signaling to the traditional transmission network and providing a control plane. It supports end-to-end service configurations and different service level agreement (SLA) levels.
Service Configuration
The topology structures of traditional WDM networks are generally chains and rings. Their services are manually configured ring by ring and node by node, which is time-consuming and labor intensive. As networks become increasingly large and complex, this service configuration mode hardly addresses the rapidly increasing user demands.
ASON solves this problem by enabling end-to-end service configuration. Specifically, to configure a service, the user only needs to specify the source node, sink node, and protection type, and the system will do the rest.
Bandwidth Utilization
Traditional WDM networks have a high proportion of resources reserved and lack advanced service protection, service recovery, and routing functions. In contrast, with the routing function and protection modes at different levels, the ASON can provide protection by reserving fewer resources, thereby increasing network bandwidth utilization.
Protection and Restoration
Traditional WDM transmission networks use chains and rings as network topologies and optical line protection and board-level protection as the service protection modes. In contrast, ASON-empowered WDM transmission networks generally use the mesh topology. In addition to sufficient protection, ASON provides the dynamic restoration function to restore services. Specifically, if there are multiple failures on a network, the services can be restored whenever possible.
According to the differences in the service recovery time, multiple service types are defined for ASON networks to meet different customer requirements.
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