White Papers

FastSMP™: Fast Shared Mesh Protection


Network resilience is a key requirement for 21st century service providers, as the ability of any system to recover from a failure is critical to meeting the customer expectation of 24 x 7 operations. The interdependence of business processes and the network, combined with an increasing number of natural disasters and manmade fiber cuts, has made the ability of the fiber infrastructure to quickly recover vital. Service providers are moving towards meshbased transport networks to provide more backup path options. To help take advantage of this architectural shift and deliver more reliable networks for lower cost, Infinera has developed a new capability called FastSMP™, extending standards-based Shared Mesh Protection. This technology leverages an intelligent GMPLS control plane so a meshed transport network can recover from multiple local and network-wide failures while lowering costs by avoiding the need to dedicate backup bandwidth for every active circuit. Infinera uses a purpose-built hardware acceleration chip included in every single card of the DTN-X, guaranteeing a sub 50ms recovery end-to-end across the network, even in the face of multiple failures.