Airports

The demands put on information infrastructures are increasing with added financial pressures. Therefore, long-term economic solutions with higher scalability become evermore important for airport operators. Choosing the right network architecture is the essential building block for a long-term competitive IT infrastructure with operational efficiency. FTTO easily bridges the high distances of large airports with horizontal fiber optic wiring, while saving valuable space for wiring closets and cable trunks, ensuring flexibility in terms of cabling length limitations and delivered bandwidth, thus reducing overall cost for installation, operation, network expansion and future maintenance.

Achieving planning reliability and reducing follow on costs

The Fiber To The Office concept offers the best of two worlds by using the technological advantages of fiber optics for the floor wiring in a building, e.g. hardly any length restrictions, interference resistance, future- proofing and long-term reliability. But in contrast to pure fiber optic concepts, FTTO uses the flexibility of twisted pair and brings it via the state-of-the-art concept of the MICROSENS Micro Switch close to the end user. A future change in technology would necessitate only the easy exchange of components to be modernised the fiber optic wiring itself would remain in its entirety. Thus, the FTTO concept combines the investment protection of fiber optic cabling with the ease of use of twisted pair wiring. 

Fiber optic infrastructure with the flexibility of Power-over-Ethernet (PoE)

The connecting element of the FTTO concept is the intelligent engineering of the MICROSENS Micro Switches. By terminating the fiber optics into copper ports, the application of PoE (Power-over-Ethernet up to 15.4 Watts) for use with some IP based systems is possible at any time, flexibility that a pure Fiber To The Desk solution cannot provide. 

FTTO is a green IT solution that cuts spending for cooling and energy 

The intelligent power management of the MICROSENS Micro Switches guarantees optimal operation of the connected devices and saves spending for energy and cooling. By avoiding the high energy losses of long copper wires, the overall energy balance of the FTTO concept is much more positive, which results into significant energy cost cuttings. Additionally, the natural resources are preserved due to less material required such as limited and expensive copper.

FTTO provides the ideal basis for the increasing bandwidth needs of modern airport operations. All modern IT based airport information systems are heavily relying on a resilient network infra-structure. In addition, new demands like IP based systems are steadily increasing and growing data volumes have to be handled by the network infrastructure. Through the use of extended fiber optic cabling, the FTTO solution ensures enhanced life cycle, maximum performance and an excellent cost-per-bit ratio.

Structured Cabling Network (SCN)

In a modern airport environment, the shortcomings of the commonly used Structured Cabling Network become apparent. The use of copper cable for horizontal wiring leads to a number of disadvantages including but not limited to the following: copper wiring cannot overcome the high distances of modern airport architecture within one building level (restricted to 90 m only). This leads to high cost for cable trunking, increased fire load from jacket material, and loss of commercial space for the consolidation of the wiring in technical rooms. 

✘ Strict lengths limitations (90 m) 

✘ Many wiring cabinets for cable consolidation needed (more than 100 per floor), wasting valuable commer- cial space

✘ Thick cable trunks with high fire load and suscep- tibility to EMI (Electromagnetic Interference) have negative impact on overall network reliability 

✘ High demand for network hardware leading to low energy efficiency, high cost for cooling and mainte- nance and average network resilience 

✘ Average bandwidth per user. One central switch port is shared by up to 24/48 users.

FTTO - Fiber To The Office extended backbone architecture

FTTO uses the highly efficient standard compliant extended backbone architecture that uses fiber optic wiring for the horizontal wiring. The technical advantages of fiber optic technology, like extended network reach and immunity to electromagnetic interference, making it the ideal choice for the requirements of modern airport installations: Saving cost for installation and IT op- eration, higher availability and maximum bandwidth for seamless converged networks (IP based systems). 

✔ Almost no length limitations (typical 10 km for single mode fiber) 

✔ Only one or two wiring cabinets needed, leaving more potential space for commercial facilities

 ✔ No cable trunks needed, no EMI susceptibility, very high network reliability 

✔ Less and only core switches needed (number depending on the design and requirement of redundancy), leading to high energy efficiency, low cost for cooling and maintenance and excellent network resilience 

✔ High bandwidth per user. One central switch port is shared by only four users per FTTO Switch.

With the optical multiplexing solutions of MICROSENS, airport operators can safe-guard their productivity by delivering the data volumes needed for modern converged networks with ease. 

New technologies such as IP surveillance and VoIP tele-phony have driven the bandwidth requirements of airports to a point, where traditional Gigabit Ethernet (1 Gbps) backbone structures reached their capacity limits quickly. The optical transport network is an easy to implement solution that multiplicates the bandwidth capacities for existent fiber optic wiring at a fraction of investment costs of laying new fiber routes.

Ensuring Geo-Redundancy with high performance data center replication

Consolidation and centralisation are the key factors of a cost efficient data center environment. The multitude of systems in mod- ern airport management to be consolidated and the growing volume of data are demanding new high capac- ity transmission technologies. Furthermore, risk management considerations increasingly challenge IT directors of airports to assure Geo-Redundancy for critical data. With their modular design, scalability and protocol transparency, MICROSENS` optical multiplexing systems are the perfect basis for the cost efficient interconnection of main and backup data centers.

High Reliability, redundant Design, Scalability

• Protocol transparency (SONET/SDH, ATM, Gigabit Ethernet, ESCON/FICON, Fibre Channel)
• Video Multiplexing (SDI, HD-SDI-PAL, HD-SDI-NTSC)
• CWDM / DWDM Systems (also in mixed operation)
• For bandwidths from 100 Mbps - 40 Gbps 
• Up to 160 separate channels, range up to 350 km