BrightLink Networks Inc. today announced it has successfully completed testing of various configurations of its BOSS 1000 optical grooming switch system, proving the "viability of its strictly non-blocking distributed architecture for SONET switching."
This type of equipment is used to manage large volumes of voice and data traffic in metro and long-distance carrier networks, officials said.
The testing was conducted at BrightLink's headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., during late November and early December 2001. Several different configurations were tested, ranging from 16 ports to 512 ports of OC-48 equivalent bandwidth, using a combination of OC-48 and OC-192 ports. This also proves the viability of the design for up to 1,024 OC-48 ports.
With these successful tests, BrightLink said it has broken the barrier to truly scalable SONET switching on both sides of the 256-port wall. Although not all network configurations require as many as 256 ports, conventional SONET switches are statically configured at this capacity, which is wasteful when fewer ports are needed.
On the other side of the wall, when networks grow to require more than 256 ports, carriers have been forced to link multiple switches together, introducing blocking into the switching configuration. The 256-port barrier is due to the semiconductor packaging limitations of the Clos architecture that has formed the basis for conventional switch design since it was first introduced by Charles Clos in 1953.
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