For government agencies, photonic switching adds a measure of security to the fiber interconnect applications. There is no converting of the data stream to electrical signals, as in OEO switches, thus the switch can’t be targeted as a place to intercept data. This opens up opportunities for secure switching at undersea cable landing sites and also cross-domain secure video conferencing.
The network reconfiguration speed of photonic switching also lends itself to disaster recovery applications, while the flexible data transmission rates supported – from 1 Mbps to 100 Gbps – means the system can be used in lawful intercept and intelligence gathering applications.
Government Applications
Cyber Security Monitoring: Deploying photonic switching with tap couplers at Cable Landing sites and country borders allows telecommunications traffic to be monitored on the Service Provider’s fiber backbone network. This results in a dramatically simpler and more cost effective monitoring solution compared with traditional Optical-Electrical-Optical (OEO) methods and also facilitates sharing of high-value test and monitoring equipment.
Subsea Cable Landing: Terrestrial Landing Sites (which terminate Subsea cables typically carry terabits of data) are often in remote un-manned locations. Even with redundancy, the time to repair a failed transponder or fiber cut is usually long and the impact of the outage is severe. Fast Photonic Switching (<20ms) minimizes these impacts by routing around multiple failures and maintaining protection schemes during network upgrades and reconfigurations.
Lab Automation & Cyber Ranges: Sharing of high-value network assets and test equipment is critical to the economic deployment of test labs and Cyber Ranges, as is the ability to reconfigure the network quickly and on-demand. CALIENT’s Adaptive Photonic Switching Solutions support these requirements entirely in the optical domain and provide an almost future-proof basis for network speed growth to 40 or 100 Gbit/s.
High Value Resource Pooling: Just as photonic switching allows sharing of high-cost equipment in labs and Cyber Ranges, similar support can be offered to the sharing of any high-value resources within a defined network. One example is the ability to share expensive Video Teleconference or Telepresence codecs between multiple VTC facilities and using Photonic Switching to provide the routing.
Data Centers: Video and Cloud Computing are driving huge growth in Data Center server deployments. This, in turn, is leading to rapid network speed expansion within the Data Center, scaling from 10 Gbit/s through 40 Gbit/s and even to 100 Gbit/s. CALIENT’s Photonic Switching Systems enable this growth and provide the physical layer support to manage resource utilization based on time-of-day or intelligent network algorithms.
Cloud Computing: CALIENT’s Photonic Switching Solutions delivers the throughput and the connectivity to provide automated fiber interconnect infrastructure for a large number of cloud computing applications, ranging from carrier hotels, to Ethernet peering points to hosted content centers. In these applications, photonic switching provides the any-to-any fiber management and interconnect needed to manage the massive fiber optic networks.
Automated Fiber Monitoring & Management: CALIENT’s all-Optical Switching Solutions enable 100% monitoring of input and output power levels on all paths. In a complex facility this can offer a high-value contribution to fault isolation within the local optical network. In addition, Photonic Switching supports on-demand network reconfiguration or patching without the need for a costly labor force in every facility location.