Cisco Technology, Inc.

Alessandro Barbieri

David Lai

Marco Foschiano

Adam Carter

Thomas Scheibe

In one embodiment, a local network device collects local optical power information for at least one of either a local optical transmit interface and a local optical receive interface of the local network device. The local network device may then exchange the local information for remote optical power information of corresponding remote optical receive and transmit interfaces of a remote network device at an opposing end of at least one corresponding optical link (fiber). For example, an exchange may use a point-to-point protocol which may dynamically determine/discover neighboring relationships between capable peer device interfaces and establish a suitable communication exchange between the capable peers. Based on the local information and exchanged remote information, the local network device may calculate an optical power loss of each corresponding optical link.

Optical link quality monitoring in a computer network

In one embodiment, a networking device may include a network port and be configured to receive a transceiver module card in the network port. The networking device may detect whether the transceiver module card is a single channel card or a multi-channel card, where the single channel card includes a single transceiver module and the multi-channel card includes multiple transceiver modules. The networking device may transmit data to the transceiver card either as a single channel de-multiplexed over multiple lanes or as multiple independent channels corresponding to the multiple lanes based on whether the transceiver module card is the single channel card or the multi-channel card. The networking device may transmit data over each of the lanes at one data rate regardless whether of the transceiver module card is the single channel card or the multi-channel card.

Growing community of inventors

Santa Clara, CA, United States of America

Alessandro Barbieri