blog

by Adrian Farrel

NGON and DCI World has become a regular event in the calendar for people working in optical networking. The 2019 conference will be held from May 21st to 23rd in Acropolis, Nice, France.

At last year’s event, the keynote address was delivered by Andrew Lord of BT and project lead for Metro-Haul. This year, the Metro-Haul project is organising a pre-conference workshop entitled “Using Open IETF YANG Models and Management Architectures to Operate Multi-Vendor Packet/Optical Networks”.

This NGON Workshop sits within the NGON “Optical Masterclass Series”:

In the space of a just 90 minutes we hope to draw on network operators, equipment vendors, standards experts, and YANG implementers to explain how IETF technologies can provide everything needed to manage and operate packet and optical transport networks in support of the kind of flexible services that 5G will present. We will illustrate the evolution of control of optical networks through the standardization of architectures and data models for centralised and distributed control to enable 5G deployments.

Part of the dissemination and coordination promise of Metro-Haul includes the delivery of workshops, and in this case we intend to ensure that the reach is wider than the usual Metro-Haul participants, and broader than a mainly academic or research-oriented audience. NGON offers us the opportunity to present our ideas to a mix of developers, deployers, and decision-makers from across the industry.

We also plan to bring in speakers from outside the project. It is a bit early to give the full list of participants, but we hope to have representatives of two European operators who are not Metro-Haul participants. We will also have an equipment vendor and a software developer at least one of which will be from Metro-Haul and who can introduce the project.

I will speak briefly on the topic of the role of the IETF in YANG model development and the specification of architectures and tools for network management. I will also try to explain the way the IETF works and the current status of IETF work. That should be easy to fit into 10 minutes 😉

We have also arranged that Sterling Perrin from Heavy Reading will chair the workshop and provide a brief top and tail to the meeting. It will be helpful to get his external view of the work.

For more details of the whole conference you can visit the web site at:

https://tmt.knect365.com/next-generation-optical-networking/

As workshop organisers we have arranged a discount code for anyone who wants to attend the event. Simply use the code “MH20” when you book, or use this direct link:

https://tmt.knect365.com/next-generation-optical-networking/purchase/select-package?vip_code=MH20

Obviously, I will blog more about the workshop as the plans develop and to let you know what happened. Watch out for Tweets about the event on our usual Twitter feed @metrohaul