Cisco NCS 4000 400 Gbps DWDM/OTN/Packet Universal Line Card Data Sheet

 

Product overview

The Cisco^® Network Convergence System (NCS) 4000 400 Gbps Universal line card converges Dense Wavelength-Division Multiplexing (DWDM), Optical Transport Networking (OTN) and Packet services into a single line card. The Universal line card can be provisioned to provide any combination of 10 Gbps, 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps grey services as well as 100 Gbps, 150 Gbps and 200 Gbps DWDM services. The card has been engineered to be a Universal line card: all services and applications supported by NCS 4000 can be efficiently deployed using just this card, without stranding any bandwidth.

The Cisco NCS 4000 Universal line card dramatically enhances system density and performances delivering 400 Gbps capacity per slot (6.4 Tbps per NCS 4016 chassis), and the ability to map traffic across the different ports on the faceplate. Selecting the type of pluggable optics, on a port-by-port basis, defines the unique profile of each Universal line card:

●     Up to 2x 200 Gbps Dense Wavelength-Division Multiplexing (DWDM) wavelengths using the CFP2 ports

●     Up to 4x 100GE/OTU4 Client interfaces using the QSFP28 ports

●     Up to 10x 40GE/OTU3 Client Interfaces using the QSFP+/QSFP28 ports

●     Up to 40x 10GE/OTU2 Client Interfaces using the QSFP+/QSFP28 ports

●     Any mix and combination of the above

The Cisco NCS 4000 400 Gbps Universal line card simplifies the integration and transport of 10 Gbps, 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps Ethernet and Optical Transport Unit (OTU) services for service provider and enterprise networks.

Cisco^® NCS 4000 400 Gbps WDM/OTN/Packet Universal Line Card

Challenge and solution

A growing number of network events are generated every day as billions of programmable devices connect to one another over the Internet. This imposes new expectations on network performance. As the Internet of Everything (IoE) builds, the role of the network to support, manage, and control these programmable device-driven events becomes critical as these tasks rapidly surpass the capacity of manual intervention. Networks must evolve to support new levels of virtualization, programmability, and performance. Networks must now scale not just bandwidth, but also compute and control functions to manage policies and generate the proper responses within the expected timeframe.

With just one line card, the Cisco NCS 4000 400 Gbps DWDM/OTN/Packet Universal line card, network operators are able to grow with programmability, scale, and convergence across the photonic, OTN, and packet switching layers. Combined, the Cisco NCS 4000 and the 400 Gbps Universal line card provide network operators with an enhanced architectural approach to profitably deliver innovative and flexible services across an evolved programmable network, while simultaneously increasing resiliency and dramatically reducing capital expenditures.

Benefits

The Cisco NCS 4000 400 Gbps DWDM/OTN/Packet Universal line card provides multiple benefits in term of Flexibility, Performance, Savings and Density improvements.

Flexibility

A single 400 Gbps Universal line card providing any mix of photonic, OTN and Packet services, supporting rates that include 10 Gbps, 40 Gbps, 100 Gbps grey services. The NCS 4000 Universal line card also provides two 200 Gbps 16-QAM DWDM Long Haul transmission ports through the CFP2 ACO pluggables.

Performance improvement

Incorporating the latest generation of Digital Signal Processor (DSP) technology dramatically increases the performance of 100 Gbps QPSK and 200 Gbps 16-QAM optical transport. Support of 8-QAM modulation format will also further enhance the capability of the NCS 4000 system, enabling the right tradeoff between fiber capacity and un-regenerated transmission distance.

Savings

The ability to configure multiple grey and DWDM ports from a single line card dramatically reduces operational costs. With only one line card to maintain, forecasting and ordering are greatly simplified, sparing is significantly reduced, and designing network expansion is far less complex, resulting in accelerated time-to-market for new services.

Density

Configuring a single NCS 4016 chassis with sixteen 400 Gbps Universal line cards delivers 6.4 Tbps of grey, OTN and Packet service capacity, including thirty-two High Speed Coherent DWDM Interfaces, all in a single 24 Rack Unit (RU) chassis - 12.8 Tbps in one full rack.

Figure below shows the deployment flexibility of the Universal OTN/DWDM/MPLS linecard with degrees of flexibility across technology and bandwidth requirements to enable the cost savings and allow for a smooth technology migration and adoption.

Deployment Options

Product description

The Cisco NCS 4000 400 Gbps DWDM/OTN/Packet Universal line card provides two High Speed CFP2-based DWDM ports, six QSFP+ based ports supporting 40 Gbps or four 10 Gbps services, and four QSFP+ or QSFP28 based ports that can support 40 Gbps, four 10 Gbps QSFP+ or 100 Gbps services.

The Universal line card supports 400 Gbps of OTN switching functionality (from ODU-0 up to ODU-4) as well as of Carrier Ethernet and MPLS switching functionalities and is directly connected through the backplane to the NCS 4000’s Agnostic Switching Fabric line card.

WDM interfaces

The Cisco NCS 4000 400 Gbps DWDM/OTN/Packet Universal Line Card provides two High Speed CFP2-based DWDM ports capable of transmitting 100 Gbps, 150 Gbps or 200 Gbps carriers, which can be transported independently across the network or combined into a 400 Gbps dual-wavelength super-channel.

Each High Speed port can be configured to support:

●     100 Gbps Coherent DWDM transmission with QPSK modulation

●     Hardware support for 150 Gbps Coherent DWDM transmission with 8-QAM modulation

●     200 Gbps Coherent DWDM transmission with 16-QAM modulation

The different modulation schemes listed above are software configurable to deliver the ideal tradeoff between reach and transport capacity per wavelength. The primary modulation schemes leveraged today for DWDM transmission are QPSK, 8-QAM and 16-QAM. The constellation diagrams for these modulation types are illustrated in Figure 3.

Constellation diagrams for QPSK, 8-QAM and 16-QAM

While higher order modulation formats provide higher spectral efficiency, they generally require more Optical Signal-to-Noise Ratio (OSNR) resulting in reduced un-regenerated reach.

Figure 4 shows the relationship of reach vs. spectral efficiency for QPSK, 8-QAM and 16-QAM modulation when using ITU-T G.652 SMF or ITU-T G.655 LEAF fiber and with varying channel spacing.

The chart provides capacity (Tbps) and Spectral Efficiency (bit/s/Hz) VS Maximum Reach (Lmax) for different modulation schemes. SMF is represented in solid lines and LEAF is represented in dashed lines.

Cisco Coherent Transmission technology greatly enhances the reach and reliability of transport performance while providing the flexibility to select the optimal modulation scheme for a specific application. The primary benefits of Cisco Coherent technology include:

●     Very strong OSNR performance

●     Outstanding chromatic dispersion robustness, avoiding any additional cost related to optical chromatic dispersion compensation equipment

●     Extended polarization mode dispersion robustness

●     Very high spectral efficiency, allowing wavelengths to be transmitted across a large number of Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexers (ROADMs)

Trunk CFP2 WDM pluggables

The Cisco NCS 4000 400 Gbps DWDM/OTN/Packet Universal line card supports Analog Coherent Optical (ACO) CFP2 WDM pluggables, featuring software-provisionable tunability across the full C-band. Both 50 GHz channels spacing (supporting 96 Nyquist shaped wavelengths) and grid-less 100MHz tuning steps are supported. Different modulation schemes are also software configurable as described earlier.

Client ports

The Cisco NCS 4000 400 Gbps DWDM/OTN/Packet Universal line card supports the following client services:

●     10 Gbps (leveraging 4x10 Gbps QSFP+) - 10GE LAN-PHY, OTU-2, OC-192/STM-64 services are available. and 8G/16G FC services are planned for in a future software release.

●     40 Gbps (leveraging 40 Gbps QSFP+) - 40GE LAN-PHY and OTU-3 services are available.

●     100 Gbps (leveraging 100 Gbps QSFP28) - 100GE and OTU-4 services are available.

Software configurable FEC option

Four different Software Defined Forward Error Correction (SD-FEC) options are supported by the Cisco NCS 4000 400 Gbps DWDM/OTN/Packet Universal line card:

●     25% Overhead (OH) for maximum performance.

●     25% Overhead (OH) with Differential Encoding.

●     15% Overhead (OH) to minimize filtering impairment.

●     15% Overhead (OH) with Differential Encoding.

The configuration of the SD-FEC overhead can be done through the available management interfaces.

OTN switching

The Cisco NCS 4000 400 Gbps DWDM/OTN/Packet Universal line card provides full ITU G.872-compliant OTN switching functions. It supports ODU-0 to ODU-4 multilayer switching and grooming including nested OTN switching. The Universal line card is capable of supporting up to 2-level ODU-4, ODU-3, ODU-2, ODU-1, ODU-0, and ODU-Flex switching functions by interconnecting with the centralized agnostic switch fabric. Ethernet Signals are mapped into ODU container as described in Table 1.

Table 1.           OTN line-card mapping

The Cisco NCS 4016 system, equipped with 400 Gbps DWDM/OTN/Packet Universal line card, supports single-chassis switching of 6.4 Tbps fully non-blocking at ODU-0 level (5120 ODU-0 or ODU-Flex data units) while the Cisco NCS 4009 system supports single-chassis switching of 3.6 Tbps fully non-blocking at ODU-0 level (2880 ODU-0 or ODU-Flex data units).

The NCS 4000 is ITU G.709 Operations, Administration, and Maintenance (OAM)-compliant, with six levels of Tandem Connection Monitoring (TCM) support.

OTN configuration, provisioning, and protection are managed by a Generalized MPLS (GMPLS)-based OTN control plane supporting an embedded User-Network Interface (UNI) as the communication interface between control planes managing different transport layers within the same system. The control-plane instance runs inside the optical domain (overlay network scenario), providing an external UNI interface to client nodes for invocation of on-demand services.

As an extension of the Cisco nLight Control Plane Protocol, an OTN circuit between ingress and egress nodes can be established statically or dynamically using Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) signaling. An OTN circuit is established and maintained as a Label Switched Path (LSP) between the ingress and egress LSRs, switched through transit LSRs.

Packet features

The Cisco NCS 4000 400 Gbps DWDM/OTN/Packet Universal line card supports packet features as defined in Table 2 on a per-ODU, or on a per-interface basis.

Table 2.           Packet feature-set

Management

The Cisco NCS 4000 system provides comprehensive management capabilities to support Operations, Administration, Maintenance, and Provisioning (OAM&P) through the integrated Cisco Transport Controller craft interface and it is also supported by Cisco Evolved Programmable Network Manager (EPN-M) Network Management System (NMS).

The card features provisionable digital wrapper (G.709) functionality, providing per-wavelength performance management capabilities, especially for services transported transparently across the network. Without the digital wrapper functions, a carrier transporting a service transparently would be unable to identify network impairments that may degrade the transported signal and violate the SLA agreements. The digital wrapper’s Generic Communication Channel (GCC) provides a separate communications channel on a per-wavelength basis to be used when transparent signals are transported. GCC allows the Cisco NCS 4000 system to extend its advanced network auto discovery capabilities to DWDM-based services. The integrated Cisco Transport Controller (CTC) craft manager and Cisco EPN-M provide the user with OAM&P functionalities for the system.

Performance monitoring

The Cisco NCS 4000 400 Gbps DWDM/OTN/Packet Universal line card provides Multi-Layer Performance Monitoring (PM) at Layer-0/1/2 and 3. The digital wrapper channel is monitored according to G.709 Optical Transport Network (OTN) and G.8021 standards. Performance monitoring of optical parameters on the client and DWDM line interface include Loss of Signal (LOS), laser bias current, transmit optical power, and receive optical power. Calculation and accumulation of the performance monitoring data are supported in 15-minute and 24-hour intervals as per G.7710.

Physical system parameters measured at the wavelength level, such as mean polarization mode dispersion, accumulated chromatic dispersion, or received optical signal to noise ratio, are also included in the set of performance monitoring parameters.

Ethernet statistics are available to provide performance monitoring of Layer 2 services.

These can greatly simplify troubleshooting operations and enhance the set of data that can be collected directly from the equipment. A detailed list of performance monitors is given in following Tables.

Table 3.           OTN performance monitoring

Table 4.           Ethernet stats

Network applications - programmable ethernet transport

The Cisco NCS 4000 400 Gbps DWDM/OTN/Packet Universal line card provides a highly scalable, cost optimized solution to aggregate and transport a large variety of services, expanding from pure OTN transport to a more sophisticated and feature-reach MPLS transport applications.

Figure 5 shows the standard OTN switching application supported by NCS 4000 solution.

OTN switching application

Figure 6 describes Packet Optical Aggregation use cases for the associated LSP technology, which provides the following benefits:

●     Predictable, Deterministic Transport-Centric (1:1 LSP Redundancy)

●     Resiliency – Sub-50 msec

●     Rich OAM

●     Fault Propagation, Connectivity Verification (MPLS-TP OAM)

●     Statistical Multiplexing

●     Programmable (RSVP-TE Extensions)

●     MPLS Scalability

Packet optical aggregation application

Licensing

The NCS4k Universal OTN/WDM/Packet Linecard can be deployed with multilayer functionality and bandwidth on an as-needed basis for unprecedented deployment flexibility.

●     Base License – Hardware, OTN functionality plus 100 Gbps of aggregate client/trunk bandwidth.

●     WDM License – Enables Coherent DWDM functionality at 100 Gig QPSK/200 Gig 16-QAM

●     Packet License – Enables L2/MPLS functionality on the linecard.

●     Bandwidth License – Enables additional aggregate client/trunk bandwidth beyond the base license.

Product specifications

Compact design

●     Single-slot card design for high-density, 400 Gbps solutions

●     Up to 16 cards per Cisco NCS 4016 shelf assembly, or 9 cards per NCS 4009 shelf assembly

Regulatory compliance

Table 5 lists regulatory compliance information for the NCS 4000 400 Gbps DWDM/OTN/Packet Universal line card. Note that all compliance documentation may not be completed at the time of product release. Please check with your Cisco sales representative for countries other than Canada, the United States, and the European Union.

Table 5.           Regulatory compliance

Other specifications

Table 6 lists system requirements for the Cisco NCS 4000 400-Gbps WDM/OTN/Packet Combo Line Card. Table 7 provides the DWDM specifications, Table 6 details receive-side optical performances, Table 8 lists performance monitoring parameters, Table 9 provides card specifications, and Table 10 gives ordering information. Please Refer to CFP2 WDM Datasheet for Physical parameters.

Table 6.           System requirements

Table 7.           DWDM specifications

Table 8.           DWDM receive-side optical performances

Table 9.           Layer 1 performance monitoring parameters

Table 10.       Card specifications

Table 11.       Ordering information

Table 12.       Supported Pluggables

Warranty information

Find warranty information on Cisco.com at the Product Warranties page

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For more information about the Cisco Network Convergence System (NCS) 4000, visit https://www.cisco.com/go/ncs4000 or contact your local Cisco account representative.

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