Nokia announced enhancements to its WaveSuite optical network automation platform aimed at meeting urgent customer needs for increased bandwidth, reliability and imperceptible latency. Nokia?s enhanced WaveSuite platform provides exceptional insight into and control of customer networks with a growing roster of applications targeting specific use cases to help them optimize their network and operations, scale network capacity and monetize network assets. In the face of increased network complexity and constrained resources, network operators are increasingly reliant on automation to make more efficient use of networking expertise and reduce human error associated with tedious manual processes, improve service turn-up times, shrink operational cost reductions and drive revenue growth.

The enhancements to WaveSuite streamline network operations to cut labor time and the inherent human errors, accelerate the introduction of new capacity to reduce time-to-revenue, and to help eliminate risks associated with network failures that impact end-customer service level agreements (SLAs). Key among the new WaveSuite enhancements is support within the Service Enablement application for network operators to better integrate BSS (business support systems) billing with optical network functions. Network operators will be able to fulfill optical service requests to wholesale partners and their end subscribers, and provide them with individualized, real-time KPI assurance metrics.

It enables them to offer differentiated services, such as latency-aware layer one services and spectrum-as-a-service, creating new revenue opportunities in a formerly untapped market. Nokia?s enhanced WaveSuite portfolio also incorporates machine learning into the Health and Analytics application to use network intelligence to support optical fiber sensing, which will help network operators detect disturbances to the fiber optic cable within their networks that may produce outages. Unlike other approaches that require additional hardware, the innovative WaveSuite solution takes advantage of polarization data provided by the coherent digital signal processor at the heart of Nokia Photonic Service Engines, such as PSE-6s.

It allows network operators to proactively identify, prepare for and respond to events in the network that may affect network performance before they occur, decreasing down time and promoting better adherence to service level agreements with customers. Finally, WaveSuite?s new features combine network planning with network provisioning, significantly reducing the effort required to scale network capacity by 33%. This enables automated flow-through provisioning by synchronizing between existing physical networks and planned network designs, eliminates errors in the transition between planning and provisioning, and significantly reduces the time and human resources network operators need to dedicate to scaling their optical networks.