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On the right track

Editorial Type: Case Study     Date: 03-2013    Views: 2085   





Madrid Metro has strengthened its communications network in order to maximise availability of its SAN and NAS systems and improve Disaster Recovery options

The Madrid Metro city and regional transport system provides a critical service for Spain's capital and its suburbs. In order to guarantee services and to minimise the impact of any natural disasters or a terrorist attack, the operator Metro De Madrid decided in 2007 to deploy additional external fibre links to reinforce communications between the main operating hubs.

With a total length of almost 300km and 230 stations, Madrid's is one of the largest metro systems in the world, which is remarkable considering the city's population of approximately 3.5 million, although 6 million people live in the greater metropolitan area. It is among the top 10 longest metros in the world - and one of the fastest growing systems. After considering various alternatives, Metro de Madrid selected Transmode to provide WDM equipment for the network improvement project, which had the joint aims of increasing network reliability and ensuring that communications services would continue in a "disaster recovery" situation.

The Madrid Metro's primary control point is based at Alto del Arenal station, just south of the city centre, with the back-up control centre located further south at the Puerta del Sur station. Both locations act as Internet data centres. Various communications services operate between these locations, which support the systems and applications to provide end user services.

In the first phase of the project, Transmode improved the communications network by providing Alto del Arenal and Puerta del Sur with high-capacity and redundant links. The optical transport network allows for spare capacity on the interconnections between these sites, so that each service provides "1+1" redundancy within 50ms of any disruptive event - communications can be transmitted or restored via both sides of the "ring" architecture.

The new Metro de Madrid installation, which is based on Transmode's TM-Series and TS-Series WDM systems, won the initial public tender because this solution was guaranteed to provide the highest network reliability as well as the best price/ performance ratio. "After studying the existing technology options and the various bidders for this project, the choice was clear: Transmode fulfilled Metro de Madrid's requirements," commented Enrique P????rez Amor????s, manager of Telecommunications, Signals & Control at Metro de Madrid. "Another important factor in Transmode's favour was that the company has substantial experience of working with other metro systems worldwide."

Each communications service - whether SDH STM-1, Gigabit Ethernet and 10G, PDH E1, FibreChannel 4G, ATM STM-1 - is delivered into the system encapsulated in 10 gigabit wavelengths. The protection signal and the main signal are transported on the fibres between the hubs. In other words, there is an identical mirror that would take over communications control in a fraction of a second if a function fails.

The Transmode solution has been optimised such that it is not necessary to insert active elements into the fibre network (such as for amplification, regeneration, chromatic distortion compensation filters, phase, etc.) which would have required maintenance and restricted the future development of the network.

The system was required to support Metro de Madrid's pre-existing critical services such as:

??????? MetroSur's low-speed (SDH) systems
??????? Metro de Madrid's (GbE) PDHoIP systems
??????? PABX and TETRA telephony systems over ATM
??????? Metro de Madrid's gigabit Ethernet LAN network (10G)
??????? SAN-NAS systems with 4G Fibre Channel connectivity

The newly installed TM-Series/TS-Series combination system offers the client special features such as:

??????? iWDM (intelligent WDM) technology, capable of automatically detecting the protocol and speed of a client signal
??????? Automatic management and monitoring of optical power, including intelligent mechanisms for automatic adjustment of the optical power levels when new services are added.
??????? The option of adding or dropping services without interrupting existing communications.

Now that the first stage has been successfully completed, Metro de Madrid has said it is planning further communications network developments. One of these will be the integration of connections between all of its main sites in a ring-shaped homogenous architecture, and another is the possibility of easy integration of any future locations following transport network extension, of which several are in planning.
More info: www.transmode.com

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