Sprint is preparing a next-generation backbone network to keep ahead of changing communications patterns and the nonstop rise of Internet traffic.
At Sprint's Advanced Technologies Laboratory, researchers are evaluating and testing technologies for integrated next-generation voice, data and IP networks.
A cornerstone of the research is a process dubbed optical-electronic switching of data packets. The technique uses lasers that intelligently direct hundreds of streams of optical traffic.
The coming shift in Sprint's network architecture marks a departure from the 1G-bps SONET (Synchronous Optical Network) ring network architecture the carrier has been building for most of the last decade. The SONET network was designed to accommodate huge volumes of voice, data and Internet traffic.
This latest evolution comes in response to the recognition that bandwidth alone isn't going to handle the Internet's rise and the exponential growth in data and multimedia traffic along unpredictable paths, Sprint researchers said.
As the sharing of distributed multimedia content grows, "it makes running a network interesting, and we just keep an eye on the traffic and hope that the backbone is beefy enough to handle it," said Robert Currier, director of data communications.
The university is presently dealing with a massive rise in multimedia traffic generated by applications such as Napster audio file sharing software, Currier said.
Sprint's proposed solution, the Hybrid Opto-electronic Ring Network, or Hornet, puts more bandwidth in the network coupled with localised intelligence and optical switching in nanosecond intervals, said Ian White, a doctoral student working at the Sprint-funded Optical Communications Research Laboratory at Stanford University.
The lab just passed its most significant milestone when it attained 4-nanosecond switching intervals between standard International Telecommunications Union-defined adjacent 100GHz wavelengths of light.
The experiment used modified transmitting lasers from Altitun to switch light quickly enough to reduce the overhead from optical-electrical switching to practical levels, said Frank DeNap, director of the Advanced Technologies Laboratory.
The next step is for Sprint to encourage manufacturers to produce "tunable" lasers so that they can be deployed at Sprint's network nodes, DeNap said.
Sprint could be ready to deploy the Hornet technology within a few years, he said.
"The benefits of this technology are going to have an indirect effect on customers," White said, by offering greatly improved network efficiency and faster data transmission speeds without a corresponding increase in cost.
At the same time, Sprint is planning by early next year to begin replacing its 40G-bps ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) backbone network switches with newer 160G-bps core switches and will also swap the 5G-bps ATM switches at the edges of its network with 20G-bps switches, officials said.
The faster ATM switches will roughly quadruple transmission rates on Sprint's 31,000 route miles of fiber and will be accompanied by plans for a corresponding capacity boost from newer Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing equipment.
