Anritsu Corporation collaborates with NTT to showcase end-to-end 400G testing for IOWN Open APN at OFC2024

Anritsu Corporation, in collaboration with Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT), will participate in the Optical Fibre Communication (OFC) net state-of-the-art network demonstration environment at the Optical Fibre Communication Conference and Exhibition 2024 (OFC2024) to be held in San Diego, United States of America (USA). Anritsu will showcase 400G testing that supports innovative optical and wireless network (IOWN) Open all-photonic network (APN).

The demand for interconnection bandwidth between datacentres has greatly increased due to the rapid spread of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and cloud services, as well as advances in digital transformation (DX). To realise a datacentre exchange (DCX) that connects remotely distributed datacentres while featuring ultra-high capacity, ultra-low latency, and ultra-low power consumption, the IOWN global forum has proposed Open APN as a new network infrastructure.

At the exhibition, IOWN networking hub, an interconnected booth utilising OFCnet, will showcase an example DCX based on IOWN APN in a multi-vendor configuration. 400G optical transceivers compliant with the OpenZR+ multi source agreement (MSA) will be mounted on data centre switches, being interconnected through an Open reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) network constructed in an adjacent booth, in accordance with OpenROADM MSA and Openlab at University of Texas at Dallas (UTD). Anritsu will provide two interconnected compact and lightweight handheld measuring instruments, MT1040A, that will simultaneously transmit and receive high-bandwidth 400-Gbps traffic, thereby demonstrating the end-to-end performance of the multi-vendor network. The MT1040A flexibly supports standard protocols such as 400G ethernet, OpenZR+, OpenROADM, and more. It provides real-time measurements of the physical layer (Layer 1) pre/post forward error connection (FEC) bit error rate (BER), as well as ethernet (Layer 2) latency and throughput.

Through this collaboration, Anritsu will contribute to forums such as the IOWN Global Forum, Open ROADM, and OpenZR+, with the realisation of DCX based on the IOWN Open APN architecture. In addition, the company will contribute to the construction of automated systems used for orchestration that integrate higher-level network management.