Nokia SRA Composite key terms

A fibre access architecture in which unpowered splitters divide one feeder fibre among many subscribers, so only the endpoints are active. Used for residential and business broadband in fixed networks.

Gigabit-capable PON standard using fixed-length frames and a 2.5 Gbit/s downstream, 1.25 Gbit/s upstream line rate, typically delivering up to 1 Gbit/s per subscriber over a shared split.

Symmetric 10 Gbit/s PON standard that coexists with GPON on the same optical distribution network by using a different wavelength pair, supporting wholesale and business services.

Optical Network Terminal: the subscriber-side device that terminates the PON fibre, converts optical signals to electrical interfaces, and is managed by the access node for provisioning and diagnostics.

Optical Line Terminal: the access-node equipment that terminates PON ports, schedules upstream grants, enforces subscriber policy, and connects the access network to aggregation and core transport.

Optical Distribution Network: the passive fibre plant between OLT and ONTs, including splitters, connectors, and closures. Its loss budget and split ratio constrain reach and achievable line rate.

The OLT mechanism that grants upstream transmission slots to ONTs based on reported queue status, balancing latency and efficiency across burst-mode shared upstream capacity.

Using a radio link instead of a wired drop to deliver broadband to a premises, typically via 4G or 5G with a rooftop or window-mounted customer terminal. Competes with fibre access.

The New Radio air interface for 5G, supporting flexible numerology, wide channel bandwidths, massive MIMO, and both sub-6 GHz and millimetre-wave deployments with low-latency scheduling.

The 5G base station node that terminates the NR air interface toward user equipment and connects to the core over NG interfaces, often split into centralised and distributed units.

Functional division of a base station into a Centralised Unit handling higher-layer and control functions and a Distributed Unit handling real-time lower layers, enabling pooled deployment and flexible fronthaul.

Antenna array technique using many active elements with beamforming to serve multiple users in the same time-frequency resource, improving capacity and coverage, especially at higher bands.

Directing radio energy toward a target device by phase-aligning signals across antenna elements, raising received power and reducing interference. Used in both access and transport microwave links.

Partitioning one physical network into logically isolated instances with dedicated performance and policy guarantees, each tailored to a service class such as industrial control or enhanced mobile broadband.

A 5G core function that securely exposes network capabilities such as location, quality-on-demand, and event reporting to authorised third-party applications through standardised APIs.

The service-based 5G core architecture in which control-plane functions register and communicate as HTTP/2 web services over a common bus, replacing point-to-point reference interfaces.

Core function that makes policy decisions for sessions, including QoS authorisation, charging rules, and slice-related constraints, and delivers them to session management functions.

The set of mechanisms that classify, mark, queue, and schedule traffic so that latency, jitter, loss, and bandwidth targets are met for each service class across each network domain.

A digital wrapper standard for optical transport that provides standardised multiplexing, operations, administration, and management, plus forward error correction and strong fault isolation at defined rates.

Wavelength Division Multiplexing: carrying multiple independent optical channels on one fibre at different wavelengths, using multiplexers and amplifiers to scale transport capacity economically.

Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing: WDM with closely spaced channels, typically on a 50 or 100 GHz grid in the C-band, enabling many terabits per fibre pair over amplified spans.

Reconfigurable Optical Add-Drop Multiplexer: a node that can remotely switch wavelengths between fibre directions and add or drop channels without manual patching, enabling agile optical restoration.

Optical spectrum allocation using variable-width slots rather than a fixed channel plan, letting each signal occupy only the bandwidth its baud rate and modulation require.

Transmission technique that encodes information in both amplitude and phase of light and recovers it by mixing with a local oscillator, enabling high-order modulation and digital compensation of impairments.

The predicted or measured end-to-end optical performance of a lightpath, accounting for amplifier noise, non-linear effects, filtering, and dispersion, used to validate path feasibility before activation.

Automatic re-routing of a failed optical lightpath over a precomputed or dynamically computed alternate path, coordinated with higher-layer protection to avoid duplicate recovery actions.

Point-to-point radio links carrying mobile site traffic where fibre is unavailable, using licensed bands, high-gain antennas, and adaptive modulation to trade capacity against fade margin.

A transport profile of MPLS with deterministic forwarding, no dynamic IP routing in the data plane, and strong operations and protection features, used for packet transport in metro and backhaul.

A source-routing approach where the ingress node encodes a path as an ordered list of segment identifiers in the packet header, removing per-hop state and simplifying traffic engineering.

Segment Routing applied to IPv6, where segment identifiers are IPv6 addresses and paths are expressed in a routing header, enabling network programming without MPLS label distribution.

A BGP-based control plane for multipoint Ethernet services that distributes MAC and IP reachability with multi-homing and fast convergence, commonly paired with MPLS or segment routing data planes.

An overlay encapsulation that carries Layer 2 frames inside UDP/IP across a routed underlay, using a 24-bit segment identifier to scale virtual networks beyond VLAN limits.

Radio Access Network: the portion of a mobile network comprising base stations and their controllers that connects user devices to the core, and the main consumer of backhaul and fronthaul transport.

The transport link between a distributed radio unit and its centralised baseband processing, carrying digitised radio samples with tight latency, jitter, and synchronisation requirements.

Distribution of precise time and frequency across a packet network using the Precision Time Protocol, required by mobile radios for scheduling and by transport for stable clocking.

Network Functions Virtualisation: running network functions as software on general-purpose servers instead of dedicated appliances, enabling rapid scaling, placement flexibility, and automated lifecycle management.

A centralised software component that maintains a network-wide view and programs forwarding devices through open interfaces, separating control logic from the data plane.

Using programmable interfaces, templates, and pipelines to configure, validate, and remediate network devices consistently, replacing manual command entry and reducing configuration drift.

A data modelling language for device configuration and state, paired with a protocol that transports model-driven operations, forming the basis of vendor-neutral programmable management.

Streaming of fine-grained operational data from network devices to collectors at short intervals, supporting near-real-time assurance, anomaly detection, and closed-loop automation.

A security model that grants no implicit trust based on network location, verifying identity and device posture for every access request and enforcing least-privilege policy continuously.