Agilent announced new support for the testing of SONET/SDH high and low order virtual concatenation on its OmniBER OTN platform. The system provides SONET/SDH/OTN testing at all standard rates from 1.5 Mbps to 43 Gbps, including comprehensive error and alarm generation, overhead access with sequence generation and capture, and jitter generation and measurement. The capability supports design and verification test applications for next-generation SONET/SDH and G.709 OTN devices and network equipment. The OmniBER OTN already supports GFP and LAPS encapsulation, while the new virtual concatenation capability is designed for support of Link Capacity Adjustment Scheme (LCAS), which enables the virtual concatenation group size to be varied in accordance with instructions from the network management system. Pricing for the SONET/SDH analyzer with GFP/LAPS encapsulation mappings and Ethernet payload structures at speeds 2.5 Gbps and below is currently available and priced at $88,000. The virtual concatenation capability will be available as a software upgrade for $20,000 in Q4 2003.
Agilent also announced the OmniBER XM, which emulates up to 192 channels per 10 Gbps OC-192 SONET port and offers simultaneous multi-channel, multi-port support for mixed mappings, error/alarm burst generation, APS service-disruption time measurement, and post-APS connectivity check.
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- Virtual concatenation is a recently defined concatenation procedure that enables data services such as Ethernet to be carried more efficiently across SONET/SDH networks. Virtual concatenation groups individual SONET/SDH containers into a virtual high-bandwidth “link.�? High order virtual concatenation container sizes are 55 Mbps and 155 Mbps, while low order container sizes are 1.5 Mbps or 2 Mbps.