31 May - 11 June 2010
SG15 Chairman; Yoichi Maeda

Overview of the third SG15 meeting of the 2009-2012 study period

Geneva, 11 June 2010, the plenary meeting of the third Study Group 15 of the study period 2009-2012 drew to a close with a total of 82 new and revised texts including 6 approved Recommendations, 58 consented Recommendations and 18 agreed documents. 369 delegates represented 22 countries with 352 Contributions and 567 Temporary Documents. This was the scale of the meeting for the last SG15 meeting in October 2009. The meeting adopted the experimental 12 day submission deadline before the SG opening for the contributions. All contributions were uploaded on the ITU-T website on the Monday one week before the SG15 opening.

ITU-T hosted the IEEE 802.1 and 802.3 interim meetings in Geneva in the week before the SG15 meeting, and had the third joint ITU-T and IEEE workshop on the future of Ethernet transport with around 150 experts present on 28 May in Geneva. The experts continued to enjoy good collaboration with IEEE during the discussions. The topics included Ethernet protection, timing and synchronization and higher speed Ethernet beyond 100 Gbit/s.

SG15 is the focal point in ITU-T for the development of standards on optical transport networks and access network infrastructures, systems, equipment, optical fibres and cables, and their related installation, maintenance, test, instrumentation and measurement techniques, and control plane technologies to enable the evolution toward intelligent transport networks. This encompasses the development of related standards for the customer premises, access, metropolitan and long-haul sections of communication networks.

The meeting approved the updated SG15’s management team including the new appointments of Rapporteurs, Liaison Rapporteurs and Editors.

The updated study group structure can be found at
http://www.itu.int/net/ITU-T/lists/sgstructure.aspx?Group=15&Period=14

The updated list of the SG15’s management members can be found at
http://www.itu.int/net/ITU-T/lists/mgmt.aspx?Group=15&Period=14.

The updated list of Rapporteurs for the Questions can be found at
http://www.itu.int/net/ITU-T/lists/rapporteurs.aspx?Group=15&Period=14

The updated list of appointed Editors of Recommendations can be found in Work Programme at
http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/workprog/wp_search.aspx?isn_sp=545&isn_sg=553

The updated list of appointed Liaison Rapporteurs can be found at
http://www.itu.int/net/ITU-T/lists/representatives.aspx?Group=15&Period=14

The meeting progressed work on Questions related to the three key areas: optical and metallic access networks, optical transport network technology and structure, and progressed Lead Study Group studies on Access Network Transport, Optical Technologies and Optical Transport Networks. The meeting reviewed and updated the SG15 Work Programme and discussed Liaison Statements from/to other groups including IEC, IETF, OIF, MEF, TM Forum, BBF and IEEE to harmonize the work with the relevant bodies.

The key progress made in this SG15 meeting included the final approvals of Recommendations on universal home networking transceivers under the G.hn banner.

The meeting agreed to request the Director of TSB to obtain G-Ach codepoints from IETF to permit ITU-T to progress its work on an MPLS-TP OAM solution for transport applications.

The networking event in SG15 was successfully organized with a support of Huawei, China, and attracted a lot of participation on 3 June 2010. It was agreed that the networking event would be held in the next SG15 meeting to facilitate communication and networking amongst participants of the different Questions.

Executive summaries from working parties and on SG15’s innovation and promotion activities

Working Party 1/15 - Transport aspects of access networks and home networking
WP1 Chairman: Tom Starr

WP 1/15 produced 6 Recommendations for approval, 8 Recommendations for consent, 4 texts for agreement, and 13 liaisons to be sent by SG15.

Q1/15 met for two days, including a joint session with Q4/15 to coordinate work on home networking. G.9971 (Requirements of transport functions in IP home network) was prepared for consent. Q1/15 began work on draft new Recommendation G.cmhn Configuration Management of IP based Home Networks.

Q2/15 met for 3.25 days. The G-PON G.984 series had one amendment (G.984.4 Am3) and one new Recommendation (G.984.7) consented. The XG-PON G.987 series had 3 documents agreed (G.987, G.987.2 rev, and G.987.3) and a supplement (G.sup.MAC-PHY-interface). The new Recommendation G.988 was consented. Future work will include improvements to the XG-PON series (e.g., G.987.re, and amendments to describe 5 Gbit/s upstream), development of G.9980, as well as maintenance.

Q4/15 met for nine days with much of the time devoted to preparing G.9960 Amendment 1 and G.9961 (G.hn, home networking transceivers - data link layer) and G.9972 (G.cx Coexistence mechanism for wireline home networking transceivers) for approval and addressing the remaining Last Call Comments, and G.992.3 Amendment 2. Work also progressed on G.hnem (Home Networking Aspects of Energy Management).

WP1/15 agreed to start the development of a new Recommendation titled Remote management of CPE over broadband networks – CPE WAN Management Protocol (CWMP) which was subsequently assigned the number G.9980. This Recommendation will be jointly developed by Q1/15, Q2/15, and Q4/15 with lead responsibility assigned to Q2/15.

In addition to interim rapporteur meetings planned for the next several months, an interim WP1/15 meeting is planned for the afternoon of 22 October 2010 to be held in Geneva, Switzerland. The objectives for this meeting are to progress the work on the home networking G.9960 series and G.hnem Recommendations with possible consent or agreement of texts related to home networking, DSL, and G.9980.

Working Party 2/15 - Optical access/transport network technologies and physical infrastructures
WP2 Chairman: Francesco Montalti

WP2 prepared 7 new and 11 revised Recommendations for consent. Two appendices of existing Recommendations and 2 Revised G-series Supplements were proposed for agreement.

Moreover, one Questionnaire was proposed for agreement, in order to gather information and technical considerations from the Members on protecting outside plant facilities from natural disasters, with the aim to progress the work of preparation of a Guideline requested by the ITU Development Sector.

The status of L-series Recommendations was examined: after careful consideration the need was recognized to update the content of five extant Recommendations, dealing with the optical access network and belonging to Q18/15. It was decided to use the information contained in the old texts for the drafting of two new Recommendations, L.oanbs - intended to describe the different aspects necessary for the design and construction of an optical access network to be used in FTTH applications – and L.socnbs - presenting a detailed description of the requirement of components to be used in optical access networks for broadband services.

It was also decided to update G.Sup.42 “Guide on the use of the ITU-T Recommendations related to optical technology” and the ITU-T Technical Paper “Guide on the use of ITU-T L-series Recommendations”.

The following is to be noted for the Recommendations consented:

L.82 “Optical cabling shared with multiple operators in buildings” gives information on the best technical solutions for the FTTH cabling of buildings, in order to assure flexibility in the cabling and give the possibility to customers to change in a simple way the telecommunication operator.

L.83 “Low impact trenching technique for FTTx networks” together with L.84 “Fast mapping of underground networks”, deal with new cost-effective techniques for the construction of the telecommunication infrastructures that facilitate the introduction of FTTx in the urban areas.

L.85 “Optical fibre identification for the maintenance of optical access networks”, L.86 “Considerations on the installation site of branching components in PONs for FTTH” and L.87 “Optical fibre cables for drop applications” are related to the deployment and maintenance of the FTTH networks.

G.695 “Optical interfaces for coarse wavelength division multiplexing (CWDM) applications”. In this version of this Recommendation, codes for 4- and 8-channel NRZ OTU2 short-haul black-link applications have been added.

G.696.1 “Longitudinally compatible intra-domain DWDM applications. » In this new version the following several topics have been added, such as Client class 100G and Mixed Transmission of 10 Gbit/s, 40 Gbit/s and 100 Gbit/s transmission wavelengths.

Among the future activities are:

• new Recommendation G.sdapp, that provides optical interface specifications towards the realization of transversely compatible seeded Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) systems primarily intended for metro applications;
• new Recommendation G.rmon, dealing with Reconfigurable Multi-Degree Optical Nodes;
• revision of G.698.2, establishing sets of parameters and associated values to enable multi-vendor interoperability for 40 Gbit/s application codes with various modulation formats;
• the studies of new methods for installation of cables in gas and water ducts;
• regarding the G.657 fibres, the investigation of the compatibility among different technologies, the reliability issues and the possibility to create new categories for bend insensitive fibres;
• studies on intelligent Optical Distribution Network systems.

Working Party 3/15 –Transport network structures
WP3 Chairman: Stephen J Trowbridge

WP3 prepared three new and thirteen revised Recommendations for consent, together with twelve amendments and four corrigenda. A revised Supplement, new appendices, and eight implementer's guides were prepared for agreement.

In fulfilling its Optical Technology and Optical Transport Network co-ordination role, WP3/15 updated the Optical Transport Networks & Technologies Standardization Work Plan (Issue 13).

The five terminology Recommendations were updated together with eight implementer's guides to reflect the movement of normative definitions from the source documents.

Continuing the work of the evolution of the Optical Transport Network hierarchy begun last year with the major revision of G.709, extending the OTN over the range from 1 Gbit/s through 100 Gbit/s, work was advanced by normatively specifying the mappings of IEEE 40GBASE-R and 100GBASE-R signals into OPU3 and OPU4, concurrent with the approval of IEEE Std 802.3ba. The OTN Architecture (G.872), Equipment (G.798), Equipment Management (G.874) and Jitter (G.8251) specifications were updated to take into account the extensions to the hierarchy completed in the previous meeting.

Work was progressed on Ethernet over Transport Recommendations, with updates to the Equipment specifications (G.8021), Protection Switching Recommendations (G.8031 on linear protection and G.8032 on ring protection), OAM (Y.1731) and Architecture (G.8010).

Many new Recommendations were progressed in the transport of time and frequency over packet networks (G.8260, G.8261 and G.8265), the Synchronous Ethernet specifications (G.8262 and G.8264), and the Precision Time Protocol (PTP) telecom profile for frequency synchronization (G.8265.1).

The ASON architecture (G.8080) was amended, and a revision was made to the discovery Recommendation for SDH and OTN networks (G.7714.1).

Updates were made to the Test Equipment Recommendations for jitter measurements of SDH (O.172), OTN (O.173) and Synchronous Ethernet (O.174).

The first two Recommendations in the MPLS-TP family were finalized, including the terminology Recommendation (G.8101) and a revision of the DCN Architecture specification (G.7712), allowing use of the MPLS-TP Generic Associated Channel (G-ACh) in the Management Communications Network (MCN) and Signaling Communications Network (SCN). The text of the architecture Recommendation G.8110.1 was brought to a state where it can be consented as soon as the normatively referenced RFCs are completed in IETF.

New work was begun in a number of areas, including shared mesh protection, hitless adjustment of ODUflex (flexibly sized ODUs carrying GFP-F mapped packet traffic in OTN networks), and the architecture of all-optical networks (AON).

Innovation and Marketing
SG15 Vice Chairman: Helmut Schink

SG15 has been informed and started discussions on work in the areas of Smart Grid and Cloud Computing. Further contacts to the ITU/UNESCO Broadband Commission and OECD have been established.

SG15 has been successfully represented in the FTTH Conference Europe spring 2010 and will be present at several conferences on cabling, synchronization, optical transport, packet networks and fibre to the home.

Four hot topics for promotion have been identified and SG15 experts work with the TSB communications officer on press releases. Also three flyers have been updated and one new flyer initiated.

A number of activities have been initiated to support developing countries such as conferences, a new handbook on optical transport, the participation in the broadband commission and the participation in a regional workshop on interoperability and conformance.