OIF also creates benchmarks, performs worldwide interoperability testing, builds market awareness and promotes education for optical technologies.
It maintains liaison relationships with many other standards-developing organizations including the ITU, IEEE 802.3, the ONF, the InfiniBand Trade Association, the TIA and the IETF.
Throughout the 2000s, the OIF produced an important series of interfaces that influenced the development of multiple generations of devices.
The OIF also defined the SerDes Framer Interface (SFI) family of specifications in parallel with SPI.
FlexE adds a calendar mechanism that leverages the 64b66b framing method of Ethernet to allow TDM-based aggregation, sub-rating and channelization features to be implemented.
This allows a large and power consuming digital signal processor to be placed on the larger card and the coherent optics module to have only analog components.
The OIF produced an influential series of Very Short Reach Interface IAs in the OC-192 era.
The OIF Architecture and Signaling working group has defined important early interfaces in the development of software-defined networking or SDN.
These include Call Detail Record, Security Extension, and Control Plane Logging and Auditing IAs.
The OIF has held many interoperability demonstrations over the years, typically at the Optical Fiber Conference (OFC) and/or ECOC trade shows.
Recent demonstrations have included multi-vendor interoperation for several of the CEI-56G reaches, CEI-112G VSR links, the CFP2-ACO interface, and FlexE.