Cost-Effective DWDM ROADM Design for Flexible Sustainable Optical Metro–Access Networks

Abstract

Abstract-Architectural changes are required at the underlying networks to support the expected Internet data traffic volume growth caused by the popularization of cloud services, 5G-based services, and social networks, whereas providing a highly dynamic connectivity. Cost-effective and energy efficient solutions for flexible network subsystems are required in order to provide future sustainable networks. In this paper, we present a cost-effective DWDM ROADM design enabling optical Metro-Access networks convergence. The cost-effective DWDM ROADM capabilities have been also assessed in an ultra-Dense Wavelength Multiplexing (u-DWDM) Ring Network scenario. In particular, the achievable network throughput has been considered. Index Terms-DWDM; ROADM; Throughput. I. INTRODUCTIONhe ICT eco-system has been rapidly and dramatically changing in the last years. New multimedia and cloud services, the deployment of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the convergence between optical and wireless communications at the 5G paradigm [1] are requiring changes to the networks in order to enable scalable growth in traffic volume, while supporting a high level of dynamic connectivity, full flexibility and increased energy-efficiency. These features can be achieved by considering the cooperation between the network control and data planes. On the one hand, the management and control of networks are evolving towards a Software Defined Networking (SDN)-based centralized architecture (see Fig. 1 accomplished by the subdivision of a DWDM channel into smaller channels called frequency slots (FS) wherein the uplink (U) and the down-link (D) for each user can be established (see Fig. 1). This paper is divided into five sections. Section II presents the proposed cost-effective DWDM Reconfigurable Optical Add-Drop Multiplexer (ROADM) node design, its operation modes and the main advantages of the proposed ROADM architecture. Section III presents the insertion loss, sensitivity and crosstalk measurements and their experimental set-up used for the ROADM characterization. Section IV presents the considered u-DWDM network scenario for proving the cost-effective DWDM ROADM capabilities; an iterative process to design each costeffective DWDM ROADM is proposed in order to obtain the achievable network throughput.Finally, Section V completes the paper with the main conclusions. II. DWDM ROADM NODE ARCHITECTUREThe ROADM design for future Metro-Access converged Networks is basically driven by new network-level requirements, such as full flexibility, adaptability, scalability, resilience and increased energy-efficiency [5]. In order to reach all those features, a new cost-effective

Photonic integrated WDM cross-connects for optical metro and data center networks

“…Given the amount of nodes and the effective traffic, low-cost and low power cons umption is important metric especially for the metro-access segment. Several recent works in this topic are presented in [5][6][7][8]. Moreover, given the 5G requirements in terms of latency, the metro access node will be equipped with computing functionalities (edge computing nodes) as well.…”

Opening up ROADMs: Let Us Build a Disaggregated Open Optical Line System

“…ROADM nodes can be designed in a variety of ways [15]. We rejected some of the more exotic ideas [16] and focused instead on WSS-based ROADM designs. The benefits and limitations of various designs have been widely understood in literature [1], [17], [18].…”

Passive Optical Networks: Introduction

“…Additionally, new receiver schemes have been researched for simplifying the optical and/or digital signal processing parts of the transceivers [113,114]. Finally, new network approaches have been researched including extended metro-access networks with cost-effective ROADMs [115,116], optical packet switching [117] and multicore fibers [118].…”