Toward Transport Ecosystem Interoperability Enabled by Vendor-Diverse Coherent Optical Sources Over an Open Line System

Optical line-side interoperability is a critical component for enabling cloud service providers to deploy capacity at scale with a diverse supply chain. Historically, vendor-locked line systems and proprietary coherent digital signal processing (DSP) technologies have been barriers to this goal. Advances in open line platforms and coherent interfaces embedded directly in layer-2/3 switches and routers have begun paving the way toward full end-toend interoperation. In this paper, we take a partial step toward demonstrating end-to-end interop by interoperating vendor-diverse packet switching platforms from Arista, Cisco, and Juniper, which utilize the same coherent DSP chip set, over an open line system (OLS). All three vendors’switches feature integrated coherent optics and are shown to interoperate over 2000 km at 150G 8QAM and 1000 km at 200G 16QAM on Microsoft’s OLS.