Ciena today introduced a new router platform that's designed to package IP and optical networking under a single management plane to address simplicity, scalability and sustainability for converged metro networks, according to Gina Nienaber, who leads product marketing for Ciena's routing and switching unit.

WaveRouter was "designed for this moment in time" as IP and optical networking are coming together, Nienaber told SDxCentral.

"Service providers are looking for a way to deal with unprecedented demand" driven by the cloud, 5G, high-speed residential broadband and enterprise business services, and "they need something different in the metro portion of their network," she explained.

Network operators are also facing operational complexity challenges because of their disparately deployed and managed IP and optical networks. Using WaveRouter, "they'll be able to deploy this coherent router ... to manage IP and optical at the same time," Nienaber said.

This product release is also expected to be a significant growth driver for the company, according to Nienaber, who cited Dell'Oro research that found the service provider edge routing market will total $8 billion by the end of the year. "WaveRouter is an important component to our coherent routing strategy, [and] it will help position us to take market share over time," she said.

WaveRouter Lego design clocks 192 Tb/s

With those industry challenges in mind, Ciena created what it describes as a "purpose-built coherent router" with the capability to scale from 6 Tb/s up to 192 Tb/s. That means organizations can build out their infrastructure "like Lego boxes" and scale up or down depending on network demand, she said.

WaveRouter's design, she added, lets service providers use optimized and integrated photonics to support high-density wave division multiplexing, "which is really important when you're trying to scale."

And contrary to most flat-shaped routers, WaveRouter takes up about half of the space of a typical telecom rack. It "looks different because it is different," Nienaber noted. "This difference in the way we designed it helps with simplified and flexible deployment models, as well as in service expansion," she noted.

Service providers can also plug the vendor's WaveLogic pluggable optics into the WaveRouter ports, which offers "a pathway to use all this amazing coherent optical technology that Ciena creates inside of a router," Nienaber touted.

WaveRouter's optimized photonics, also referred to as coherent line systems, are designed for network locations that are closer to the customer and well-suited for metro networks, she added.

WaveRouter will be generally available in Q3 of this year.

Ciena Manage Control Plane (MCP) software pulls together IP, optical management

Ciena WaveRouter includes a holistic view of each piece of the routing platform through the vendor's MCP software, which allows for the management of Layer 0 (the photonic line system) to Layer 3 (IP).

"If you can see it all together, then you can manage it all together. You can coordinate it all together. You can control it all together," Nienaber said. "That's one of the main things for sustainability, growth and efficiency," she added. "If you have to manage all these things in silos, you can't optimize."

Routing platform focuses on space, energy use, cooling

The vendor claims its WaveRouter platform is built on an "extensible, energy efficient platform architecture" focused on limiting the use of physical space, energy, and cooling.

Metro routers are typically housed in central offices owned by the service provider that constrained on all three of those fronts, Nienaber explained. "And as bandwidth goes up, it gets more difficult because you need more routers to handle the demand," she said.

That leaves operators that have sustainability goals or requirements in a tough spot. The legacy process of disparate IP and optical networks "is really hurting their sustainability aspirations," she argued.

And according to her conversations with customers, network operators searching for metro routing platforms are ecstatic when she tells them they could "deploy a metro router with a higher degree of flexibility" that addresses those space, power and cooling constraints, Nienaber said.