Lucent Technologies has unveiled an intelligent optical-data networking platform that will enable customers to cost-effectively provide bandwidth-on-demand and other new revenue-generating services.

Lucent's leading-edge platform is built around its all-optical switch - the WaveStar LambdaRouter - and two new, industry-leading software products from Bell Labs that enable carriers to control individual wavelengths of light carrying all forms of telecommunications traffic. Lucent's new intelligent routing software will enable its all-optical switches to communicate with one another, instantly discover new switches and links as they are added to a network's topology and automatically redistribute wavelengths in response to fluctuating traffic demands and network resources. Using these products, service providers will be able to offer their customers networks with unparalleled levels of flexibility, reliability, auto-recovery and quality of service that can scale to multi-terabit capacities.

"In July, Lucent shipped the industry's first all-optical switch - WaveStar LambdaRouter. Today, we are introducing the industry's first all-optical wavelength management software," said Jeong Kim, president of Lucent's Optical Networking Group. "By adding intelligence to the LambdaRouter, we are unlocking the true value of all-optical switches and providing customers with cost-effective ways to offer new revenue-generating services."

Mesh Networks Provide Reliability, Flexibility and New Revenue Opportunities Lucent's platform will enable service providers to build highly scaleable, mesh-based networks. In a mesh network environment, each central hub is connected to other hubs by direct links that are based on traffic demand and are individually scaleable. Lucent's two new software packages work hand-in-hand with its all-optical switches and dense wave division multiplexing systems to maximize the reliability and revenue-generating potential of these networks:

Lucent's Optical Services Manager, which Bell Labs brought from research to market in just eight months, is an innovative software platform that provides network operators with such capabilities as "point-and-click" bandwidth provisioning. Using Lucent's OSM software, network operators can remotely direct a LambdaRouter in Chicago, for example, to increase the number of wavelengths it is sending to Seattle and decrease the number it is sending Denver (and vice versa) as traffic between those cities fluctuates. This will enable carriers to offer such revenue-generating services as bandwidth trading, optical virtual private networks and dynamic bandwidth control, as well as create their own custom services.

Lucent's Optical Network Navigation System will reside within individual LambdaRouters - providing intelligent distributed routing functionality. By enabling the all-optical switches to communicate with one another, the software allows them to continually inventory a network's resources, self-discover changes in the network's topology and redefine a signal's most efficient path between two endpoints.

This distributed routing capability enables rapid, cost-effective turn-up of new network nodes and additional bandwidth without the extensive off-line, database entries required today. It also enables the network to instantly reroute signals in the event of a fiber cut.

Lucent's OSM software is commercially available now. Lucent will begin controlled introduction of its ONNS software in the third calendar quarter of 2001, with commercial availability scheduled for September 2001. The WaveStar LambdaRouter is commercially available now. Lucent already has shipped the LambdaRouter to four customers for trials.

Lucent demonstrated the interoperability of its optical and data products in September of this year at the Networld+Interop show in Atlanta. In the demonstration, Lucent used Dynamic Optical Signaling to enable the WaveStar LambdaRouter to communicate with its GX 550 multiservice switch and the NX64000 multi-terabit switch/router. The demo represented Lucent's ability to build converged, intelligent networks that can quickly create high capacity, optical-data links on demand.

Lucent's Bell Labs has garnered more than 2,500 patents in optical technology alone. Lucent was first to market with a DWDM system in 1995, and has since shipped more DWDM systems than any other vendor. Lucent also was first to market with an all-optical switch delivering the industry's first all-optical switch in July 2000.