TWIN as a Future-Proof Optical Transport Technology for Next Generation Metro Networks

International audienceThe continuous growth of the traffic at a rapid pace raises challenges related to the efficient use of resources and saving of energy in the transport network. The new traffic pattern is characterized by faster growth of metro traffic compared with core, due in part to video content replication. In this paper, we compare the resource requirements of three different transport technologies (optical packet switching, opaque circuit switching and transparent circuit switching) within two architecture scenarios (the current hub-and-spoke architecture and the next generation distributed architecture). The comparison study takes into consideration the predicted traffic growth from 2014 to 2019 and the potential traffic decentralization due to content replication. For the optical packet switching, we focus on Time-domain Wavelength Interleaved Network (TWIN) solution which achieves passive switching at the intermediate nodes thanks to the precomputed optical packet emission schedule. Results show that TWIN outperforms the other transport technologies in terms of number of transmitters and receivers with a high ability to cope with scalability issues