Taipei – October 09, 2024: Today, the Innovative Optical and Wireless Network Global Forum (the IOWN Global Forum) announced NTT’s Open All-Photonic Network (APN) Proof of Concept (PoC) Project as the winner of its 2024 PoC of the Year. The award ceremony took place at the IOWN Global Forum’s members conference in Taipei, Taiwan, which shines a light on the work of the Forum to deliver the communications networks of the future.

NTT’s Open APN PoC demonstrates the successful completion of a single-phase project aimed at testing and validating IOWN features. The PoC demonstrated key objectives, including support for APN-G functions (for network control and user-owned transceivers), open interface verification, automation provisioning, and fast streaming telemetry monitoring.

The demonstration was carried out in a metro area network, with critical results confirming the efficiency of path setup times, power consumption benchmarks, and real-time telemetry performance. Key findings highlighted the APN’s ability to handle optical path provisioning, wavelength management, and monitoring through NTT’s system architecture.

Among the verified technical advancements were the following:

  • APN-G functionality: The system verified control mechanisms such as multiplexing/demultiplexing, admission control, and power consumption metrics. The PoC also tested acceptable fiber distances and data loss.
  • Open interface verification: The system achieved successful communication between APN components, with logs confirming efficient path setup times using the Open ROADM and TAPI standards.
  • Automatic provisioning: The project successfully validated the automated configuration of optical paths between client signals, reducing manual intervention in provisioning processes.
  • Network attachment for user-owned devices: The PoC verified the registration process and the optical path setup for user-owned transceivers, demonstrating compatibility with third-party equipment.
  • Streaming telemetry: Monitoring features for key performance indicators like optical power and error rates were efficiently captured using real-time live streaming telemetry.

NTT’s award-winning PoC plays a crucial role in contributing to the IOWN Global Forum’s efforts, with the results feeding into future releases of the APN architecture. The PoC identified gaps in the current standards, particularly in remote control and user-owed device integration, which will inform subsequent development phases. In addition, detailed APN-C functional architecture and examples of APN-C sequences based on this PoC help to clarify how APN-C can be realized.

NTT plans to refine the implementation architecture further, improve system response times, and adapt APN components to cutting-edge network technologies for future use cases.

About the IOWN Global Forum

The IOWN Global Forum was established in 2020 as a private sector organization to develop IOWN technologies and use cases. As of the end of 2023, it is comprised of over 150 organizations. The objective of the IOWN Global Forum is to accelerate innovation and adoption of a new communication infrastructure to meet our future data and computing requirements through the development of new technologies, frameworks, specifications, and reference designs in areas such as photonics R&D, distributed computing, use cases and best practices. For more information, visit Home – IOWN Global Forum – Innovative Optical and Wireless Network.

About the IOWN Global Forum’s PoC Program

The PoC Program is an external activity designed to encourage implementation of IOWN technologies. PoC teams develop PoCs outside of the Forum and submit PoC Reports to the Forum to achieve the IOWN Global Forum Recognized PoC designation and influence internal Forum activities such as the development of technical documents and software. For a list of published PoC References visit the Forum Technology webpage. Further PoC References will be continuously published based on the latest technical documents covering domain-specific references, complementary platforms, and the foundational infrastructure.

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