Cisco today said the telecom operator Vodafone Germany went live with Cisco’s segment routing technology in August 2016 in order to make its network ready for software-defined networking (SDN).

“Segment routing architecture seeks the right balance between distributed intelligence and centralized optimization,” wrote a Cisco spokesperson in an email to SDxCentral.

Cisco’s segment routing does not require any path signaling. Per-flow states are encoded in the packet header, not in the network fabric. The network fabric is stateless.

Segment routing runs natively on an MPLS data plane, and it can coexist with existing MPLS infrastructure. According to Cisco, the technology permits a unified forwarding plane for end-to-end policies to be set across independent metro, WAN, and data center domains.

“No specific protocol is required; it’s just simple extensions to current routing protocols,” said Jonathan Davidson, general manager of Cisco’s service provider networking unit, in a blog posting. “Sensitive traffic can be directed over paths that match certain latency requirements without having to maintain any state in the network fabric. Vodafone Germany is currently witnessing a 50 percent latency reduction.”

Cisco claims its segment routing makes network infrastructure SDN-ready.

Vodafone Germany's parent company the Vodafone Group is conducting a virtualization project internally named “Project Ocean.” It’s a group-wide transformation to virtualize its network and compute infrastructure and to use cloud technology.