DRIVING PERFORMANCE AND PRODUCTIVITY

WaveRouter is the industry’s first purpose-built router for the converged metro designed to support the growing demand for high-bandwidth services like 5G, high-speed broadband, enterprise business services, and cloud. It meets the rigorous demands of metro networks by bringing together the best of platform architecture, transport technologies, and software to eliminate trade-offs in space, power, cooling, and scalability.

Unlike other metro routing platforms, WaveRouter is optimally designed to scale and evolve via an extensible and flexible converged architecture, across multiple dimensions— routing, optical, and compute.

WaveRouter features a unique, extensible router switch fabric for in-service hardware upgrades without performance degradation, making it possible for service providers to scale as they grow so they don’t have to make capacity deployment decisions upfront. It also utilizes industry-leading WaveLogic coherent optics which allow service providers to integrate the latest coherent advancements without having to perform forklift upgrades. With WaveRouter, service providers can manage IP and optical network services in a single interface, reducing operating costs and driving optimal network performance and growth.

WAVEROUTER, FEATURING THE BEST

Legacy and current router platform architectures are not designed for the demands of metro networks—in many cases forcing operators to sacrifice in the areas of scalability, operational simplicity, and sustainability. They have trade-offs that can lead to mixed business results such as decreased return on investment (ROI), increased total cost of ownership (TCO) (capex, opex), or limited sustainability:

1. Chassis: Limited by backplane, heat and power, space, and multi-chassis extensibility

2. DDC: Low sustainability, energy efficiency, and operational efficiency

3. Leaf-spine: Operational complexity and inability to cost-effectively grow in some situations

Whereas WaveRouter is an innovative platform architecture that doesn’t have a direct competitive solution. It features the best aspects of traditional chassis and leaf-spine for increased sustainability, higher ROI, and lower TCO:

1. Chassis: Housing with common fan and cooling; N+1 power

2. Leaf-spine: Distributed, disaggregated, and extensible fabric; server-based clustering for control plane

3. Transport: Continuously evolve to industry leading coherent optics to deliver the highest capacity at the lowest space, power, and cost

Software for programmability and scale: Routing and operations, administration, maintenance (OAM); multi-layer network intelligence

Towards Sustainable Goals

WaveRouter is a sustainable and flexible solution that does not compromise performance. Legacy telco offices generally have controlled environmental constraints. WaveRouter’s distributed housing and footprint-efficient design improve thermal flexibility, enabling it to overcome space and power constraints. It is also highly adaptable, allowing for deployment in non-adjacent racks/rows, and it uses front-to-back air-cooling efficiency to overcome thermal limitations. The solution’s angled faceplates enable the use of low-cost, industry-standard Direct Attached Copper (DAC) cables instead of more expensive optical fabric cables. This not only reduces costs but also promotes sustainability by using zero power and being non-restrictive.

Key Takeaways

1. WaveRouter features the best aspects of traditional chassis and leaf-spine for increased sustainability, higher ROI, and lower TCO.

2. They help customers achieve their sustainability goals by finding the optimal balance between metro router density, power, space, and cooling.

3. WaveRouter is an innovative platform architecture that doesn’t have a direct competitive solution.

4. Today operators in the Middle East and across the globe face three major challenge.

WaveRouter’s shared and expandable pay-as-you grow power distribution, port utilization, and node expansion keep TCO low and support sustainability targets by enabling the deployment of network resources when needed. Moreover, Ciena’s WaveLogic performance-optimized coherent optics and footprint/power-optimized pluggables give providers the choice to satisfy all network requirements at the lowest cost with optimal space and power utilization.

Overall, WaveRouter helps customers achieve their sustainability goals by finding the optimal balance between metro router density, power, space, and cooling.

Advancements And Opportunities

Most international service providers strive to provide their clients with networks that are quick, dependable, secure, and effective. Advances in IP/optical convergence in the metro are critical to network evolution. Continued innovation in this field is essential as the telecom industry moves massive amounts of data over 5G, between devices, and to the cloud while minimizing our carbon footprint.

WaveRouter is the next step in bringing together Ciena’s Coherent Routing technology innovation with IP routing architecture, packaging them in a new platform design with Ciena WaveLogic coherent optics and advanced multi-layer coordinated control to substantially driving down the cost of networking for service providers, while also providing new business opportunities. It addresses higher-capacity locations, enabling customers to build end-to-end network infrastructures.

Greater Challenges Ahead

Today, operators in the Middle East and across the globe face three major challenges:

1.Unprecedented traffic demand is driven by exponential growth in broadband, 5G, and cloudbased applications

2. Operational complexity caused by fragmented and time-consuming operational tools for the management of IP and optical

3. Increased space, energy, and cooling costs from surging bandwidth demand are defeating sustainability aspirations

Modernization of metro networks with WaveRouter addresses these challenges by delivering:

1. Powerful transport interfaces with integrated coherent optics for flexible, future-proof scale with in-service fabric expansion, optimized high performance transport (coherent), and elastic compute

2. Simplified, accelerated, and intelligent network control via Ciena’s Manage, Control and Plan (MCP) for operational simplicity to optimize converged network performance

3. Extensible, energy-efficient platform architecture for increased sustainability via space, power, and cooling efficiencies.