FEATURE OPTICAL SYSTEMS


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In less than a decade, everything could be connected to the Internet of Things. What impact will this have on the businesses of optical transport vendors, wonders Rebecca Pool


of Tings 2016, the US telecommunications giant asserts 2015 was the year IoT gained legitimacy, and that companies worldwide have IoT ‘squarely on their radar’. According to the report, the worldwide IoT


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market is expected to reach US$1.3 trillion in 2019, double today’s figure. Meanwhile the installed base of IoT end points will nearly triple to reach 25.6 billion devices in the same period. But as wireless industry players get to grips with


connecting the proliferation of sensor-laden devices, should optics vendors really care? As Stephan Rettenberger, vice president of marketing and investor relations at ADVA Optical Networking, admits, disruption in mobile networks is going to outweigh any changes that will take place in optical networks. ‘Bandwidth demand is no longer generated by


just human beings; a mind-boggling number of [wirelessly connected] devices are now going to be generating and consuming data,’ he said. ‘Ultimately this all comes together in an optical network, which will provide the bandwidth for whoever needs capacity. Without optical networking, [communications] won’t scale,’ he said. Loudon Blair, senior director of corporate


strategy at Ciena, agrees. Although the optical layer of the network will not be directly exposed to the Internet of Tings, he is certain that optical will be critical to its success. ‘Tis layer will not be directly impacted by the


significant endpoint scaling and IP address space challenges associated with the enormous device proliferation,’ he explained. ‘But IoT will affect how the access and aggregation networks combine and distribute large volumes of data to and between data centres, and where IoT information will be stored and processed.’ Kyle Hollasch, head of optical marketing at


18 FIBRE SYSTEMS Issue 12 • Summer 2016


Nokia, also highlights how the tens of billions of devices connected to the IoT will require extremely fast, reliable, flexible and ubiquitous connectivity. ‘Virtual reality, for example, must be connected at any time with extremely low delay,’ he noted. ‘For this, optical connectivity, IP routing and transport will be crucial.’


The coming data deluge Te IoT is likely to span many industries including building management, medical, shipping, airlines, law enforcement and public services. Connected objects will communicate a variety of data types from small telemetry packets to media-rich streaming video. Across the board, industry players believe that as


these billions of devices start transmitting information to the network, large-scale packet aggregation will be critical. As Ciena’s Loudon Blair points out, network


vendors will play an important aggregation role, funnelling IoT traffic from access connections through larger optical pipes to data centres. ‘Vendors will need to scale optical access systems to accommodate growth in aggregate access demand,’ he commented.


Jonathan Homa, director of portfolio


marketing at ECI, is adamant that optics vendors will have to look closely at packet- optical transport platforms, and engineer them to support the characteristics of data generated by the IoT.


To date, internet traffic has been characterised


by a low frequency of transactions with moderate latency requirements, he explained. Indeed, as he quipped: ‘We can’t even tell if there is an additional 100ms delay in response time to a Google search.’ But this is set to change. As IoT brings more


autonomous machine-to-machine applications – think Smart City and, of course, driverless cars, as well as the next generation of human interface device applications, including real-time gaming – networks must provide fast, low-latency responses. ‘We can turn off latency-inducing mechanisms,


such as forward error correction, which are absolutely necessary for long-distance communications but may not be needed for IoT applications in a constrained metro-region,’ said Homa. At the optical transport level, the ECI director


highlights the importance of platforms being able to scale ‘gracefully’ from supporting today’s 400G


s the world prepares for the Internet of Tings (IoT), Verizon claims the technology is already mainstream. In its latest reportState of the Market: Internet


Mascha Tace/Shutterstock.com


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