Precision OT Announces Partnership With Clarkson University to Collaborate on Optical Network Simulation Research

Rochester, NY – August 26, 2019 – Precision OT, a leading provider of optical transceivers and related active/passive optical components, announces today a new partnership with Clarkson University. The Rochester-based company will assist Dr. Yaoqing Liu to integrate optical network emulation functionality into Mininet, an open source network emulation and simulation tool. The project will formally begin in September 2019 and is set to last between one and two years. When complete, it will provide a host of new, powerful capabilities for access and transport optical network operators to design, test, and troubleshoot their systems virtually.

“While Mininet currently can emulate an entire software-defined network (SDN) on a single machine, it does not yet provide full insight all the way down to the optical layer of a network,” says Chris Page, CTO of Precision OT and Clarkson alumnus. “We are excited to leverage our optical networking and transceiver expertise to assist Dr. Liu in giving the wider optical networking industry the capability to use Mininet for development and testing. Eventually, we foresee having the ability to bring in ‘virtual’ transceivers and other passive/active optical equipment into the Mininet environment.  This capability will also further enhance Lightseer, our own machine learning-powered SDN application for optical network analytics.”

As a network emulator, Mininet allows engineers to create a complete experimental network on a single server or other PC. The environment offers an easy way for developers to collaborate on complex topology testing, debugging and prototyping without the need to wire up a physical network. Although it is usable as an out-of-box solution, it also provides network architects with an extensible Python API for custom network creation and experimentation. Any code developed and tested on Mininet can move to a real system with minimal changes, providing an efficient, cost-effective way for network administrators to address issues in an isolated environment and evolve their systems over time.

Todd Davis, CEO and fellow Clarkson alumnus spoke of the partnership, saying “We are thrilled to be a part of this initiative. For Clarkson University, Precision OT will be a strong partner through our years of expertise in developing and testing the widest variety of cost-effective transceivers and optical networking technologies.”

To learn more about Precision OT, visit www.precisionot.com.