Enabling Optical Wired and Wireless Technologies for 5G and Beyond Networks

The emerging fifth-generation mobile communications are envisaged to support massive number of deployment scenarios based on the respective use case requirements. The requirements can be efficiently attended with ultradense small-cell cloud radio access network (C-RAN) approach. However, the C-RAN architecture imposes stringent requirements on the transport networks. This book chapter presents high-capacity and low-latency optical wired and wireless networking solutions that are capable of attending to the network demands. Meanwhile, with optical communication evolutions, there has been advent of enhanced photonic integrated circuits (PICs). The PICs are capable of offering advantages such as low-power consumption, high-mechanical stability, low footprint, small dimension, enhanced functionalities, and ease of complex system architectures. Consequently, we exploit the PICs capabilities in designing and developing the physical layer architecture of the second standard of the next-generation passive optical network (NG-PON2) system. Apart from being capable of alleviating the associated losses of the transceiver, the proposed architectures aid in increasing the system power budget. Moreover, its implementation can significantly help in reducing the optical-electrical-optical conversions issue and the required number of optical connections, which are part of the main problems being faced in the miniaturization of network elements. Additionally, we present simulation results for the model validation

Benchmarking and viability assessment of optical packet switching for metro networks

Optical packet switching (OPS) has been proposed as a strong candidate for future metro networks. This paper assesses the viability of an OPS-based ring architecture as proposed within the research project DAVID (Data And Voice Integration on DWDM), funded by the European Commission through the Information Society Technologies (IST) framework. Its feasibility is discussed from a physical-layer point of view, and its limitations in size are explored. Through dimensioning studies, we show that the proposed OPS architecture is competitive with respect to alternative metropolitan area network (MAN) approaches, including synchronous digital hierarchy, resilient packet rings (RPR), and star-based Ethernet. Finally, the proposed OPS architectures are discussed from a logical performance point of view, and a high-quality scheduling algorithm to control the packet-switching operations in the rings is explained

Supporting Diverse Customers and Prioritized Traffic in Next-Generation Passive Optical Networks

The already high demand for more bandwidth usage has been growing rapidly. Access network traffic is usually bursty in nature and the present traffic trend is mostly video-dominant. This motivates the need for higher transmission rates in the system. At the same time, the deployment costs and maintenance expenditures have to be reasonable. Therefore, Passive Optical Networks (PON) are considered promising next-generation access technologies. As the existing PON standards are not suitable to support future-PON services and applications, the FSAN (Full Service Access Network) group and the ITU-T (Telecommunication Standardization Sector of the International Telecommunication Union) have worked on developing the NG- PON2 (Next Generation PON 2) standard. Resource allocation is a fundamental task in any PON and it is necessary to have an efficient scheme that reduces delay, maximizes bandwidth usage, and minimizes the resource wastage. A variety of DBA (Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation) and DWBA (Dynamic Wavelength and Bandwidth Allocation) algorithms have been proposed which are based on different PONs (e.g. EPON, GPON, XG-PON, 10G- EPON, etc.). But to our knowledge, no DWBA scheme for NG-PON2 system, with diverse customers and prioritized traffic, has been proposed yet. In this work, this problem is addressed and five different dynamic wavelength and bandwidth allocation (DWBA) schemes are proposed. First, mixed integer linear programming (MILP) models are developed to minimize the total delay of the high priority data. Due to the MILP’s high computational complexity, heuristic algorithms are developed based on the MILP model insights. The five heuristics algorithms are: No Block-Split Heuristic (NBH), Equal Block-Split Heuristic (EBH), Priority Based No Block-Split Heuristic (P-NBH), Priority Based Equal Block-Split Heuristic (P-EBH), and Priority Based Decider Block-Split Heuristic (P-DBH). Six priority classes of requests are introduced with the goal of minimizing the total delay for the high priority data and to lessen the bandwidth wastage of the system. Finally, experiments for the performance evaluation of the five DWBA schemes are conducted. The results show that P-NBH, P-EBH, P-DBH schemes show a 47.63% less delay and 30% of less bandwidth wastage on average for the highest priority data transmission than the schemes without priority support (NBH and EBH). Among these five schemes, NBH method has the highest delay, whereas EBH and P-EBH waste more bandwidth than the other schemes. P-DBH is the most efficient among the five because this scheme offers the lowest delay for high priority data and the minimum bandwidth wastage for lower priority ones. Adviser: Byrav Ramamurth

The Italian research project ROAD-NGN ‘Optical frequency/wavelength division multiple access techniques for next generation networks'

The paper describes the activities of the Italian national research project ROAD-NGN ‘Optical frequency/wavelength division multiple access techniques for next generation networks’; the project aims to investigate and experiment new technological solutions to facilitate the migration of access systems from copper to optical fibre, and to help the integration with broadband wireless architectures, with particular interest for the backhauling of the fourth generation (4G) Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks. The approaches, based on the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) techniques, can enable the unbundling of the local loop (ULL) and are upgradable toward very ultra wideband systems