Investment required: £20m

    Mobile - Communication Electronics: Distributed Switching

    Synopsis
    The company has developed a distributed switching system with ports hundreds of kilometres apart, that allows carriers to virtualise the connectivity in their networks, resulting in a step-change in efficiency.

    Stage - Expansion
    The company has developed a distributed switching system with ports hundreds of kilometres apart, sub-wavelength networking allows telecom operators to scale their networks in a way that is simpler to operate, uses fewer components and can cope with highly dynamic traffic demands.
    The company has created a sub-wavelength system that virtualises connectivity into a single distributed switch. It is an entirely new way of switching packets over long distances, creating an optical Ethernet switch fabric that can switch packets across hundreds of kilometres.
    The company's technology uses tuneable LASERs to switch packets optically and in real-time.
    There are no 'nailed-up' paths in the system, so bandwidth is instantly available to any point in the system - enabling a simple and dynamic operating environment. And because there are no electrical switch ports consumed connecting L2/3 switches together, the overall number of components is greatly reduced - reducing capex and opex costs.
    The company's implementation of sub-wavelength networking. Optical Packet Switch & Transport (OPST), is a distributed optical switch fabric technology that uses ultra fast tuning lasers to provide fully meshed, any-to-any resilient port connectivity, and is service and data format agnostic.
    Every port attached to the OPST fabric has a Fast Tuneable Laser (FTL) and Burst Mode Receiver (BMR) under that port's local control. The system assigns a unique wavelength to each BMR, so as ingress packets are queued by class of service per wavelength. The laser is tuned in real-time (nanoseconds) and multi-service frames are launched to the chosen destination via the assigned wavelength. Each port, can therefore, send and receive frames to and from all other ports providing a fully distributed switching capability with no intervening OEO between source and destination.
    The OPST architecture provides unequalled and elegant linear scalability as well as operational efficiency. As new ports are individually added to the optical mesh fabric the optical paths are discovered and the logical data paths are assigned non-blocking connectivity to the new ports on the OPST meshed fabric.
    The company's product family of iVX8000 switches has the unique ability to respond dynamically to changes in network service traffic demands while maintaining guaranteed class of service commitments. Access to this dynamic infrastructure is fully programmable and available via the Restful Web Services interface.

    Opportunity for China: Network Switching