This paper reports and demonstrates a packetponder for access/metro node consolidation and aggregation using common-form-factor pluggables (CFFP), which can simplify edg e network architectures.

Networking equipment with OpenAPIs admit automation of end-to-end services that span optical and packet domains. Adoption will be considered and proportionate to match business logic that lubricates and couples several architectural domains in a TELCO; and constrained by scarcity of programmers adept at effecting the necessary automation.

Network operators will require autonomous operation with the help of artificial intelligence to reduce operational expenditures and to create networks that are easier to manage and maintain. However, not all operators operate in the same way. Therefore, we may have different operator-specific use cases for such autonomous operations. Differences may arise from the range and variety of services and social and/or cultural difference/background. However, we believe that there should be a common framework to achieve such an autonomous world in network operation. We discuss such operator-specific use cases and requirements in this paper. Then, we propose a possible common network diagnosis framework (the CAT cycle) and its platform to meet the requirements.

Where and what kind of whitebox technology will appear in telecom operator networks and what benefits will it bring?

Forwarding-, control-, and management-plane disaggregation with OpenAPIs offer automation of compute, storage and networking resources across optical carrier-switched and electronic packet-switched domains. Open, bare-metal hardware outfitted with merchant silicon hosting open software reduce barriers to entry and have deep historical roots in computer evolution in the last century. History may be about to repeat itself

Hardware and software disaggregation is a recognized strategy for achieving efficiency and cost reduction within datacentre warehouse. More recently this approach has been applied to high-bandwidth inter-datacenter connectivity at the transport layer. Telecom Operators look with great interest at this approach which promises savings that could make the difference in years of ever decreasing margins on revenues. This paper presents and analyzes how disaggregation models in the wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) transport layer could replace the established aggregated model based on mono-vendor systems. Three optical disaggregation models are presented implying different levels of involvement of the telecom operator in WDM system design, assembly, and integration. The impact on the network lifecycle of each model is then analyzed with particular reference to the roles of the operator, the equipment vendors, and the system integrator. The issue of organizational changes and heavy redefinition of processes is addressed and a comparative techno economic analysis is also offered.

We report a unidirectional frequency dissemination scheme for high-fidelity optical carriers deployable over telecommunication networks. For the first time, a 10 Gb/s Binary Phase Shift Keying (BPSK) signal from an ultra-narrow linewidth laser was transmitted through a field-installed optical fibre with round-trip length of 124 km between Cork City and town of Clonakilty, without inline optical amplification. At the receiver, using coherent communication techniques and optical injection-locking the carrier was recovered with noise suppression. The beat signal between the original carrier at the transmitter and recovered carrier at the receiver shows a linewidth of 2.8 kHz. Long term stability measurements revealed fractional instabilities (True Allan deviation) of 3.3 × 10(-14) for 1 s averaging time, prior to phase noise cancellation.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) provide an alluring vision of how to transform broadcast, contribution and content distribution networks. In our laboratory we assembled a multi-vendor, multi-layer media network environment that used SDN controllers and NFV-based applications to schedule, coordinate, and control media flows across broadcast and contribution network infrastructure. — This paper will share our experiences of investigating, designing and experimenting in order to build the next generation broadcast and contribution network. We will describe our experience of dynamic workflow automation of high-bandwidth broadcast and media services across multi-layered optical network environment using SDN-based technologies for programmatic forwarding plane control and orchestration of key network functions hosted on virtual machines. Finally, we will outline the prospects for the future of how packet and optical technologies might continue to scale to support the transport of increasingly growing broadcast media.

We experimentally investigate an improved fast orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) scheme using intensity modulation and full-field detection. This new fast OFDM algorithm exhibits better back-to-back and transmission performance than the conventional one, and is shown to support a 40-Gb/s signal over a 480-km re-circulating loop-based single-mode fiber (SMF) with 1-dB penalty. We compare this scheme with the direct-detection (DD) system using the same algorithm, and show that the DD system cannot support 60-km SMF at 40 Gb/s. Finally, we demonstrate the proposed scheme over 124 km of BT Ireland's field-installed fiber without inline optical amplification. The results show that this scheme can be a promising solution to address the gap between direct detection and coherent detection for applications in short metro networks and long-reach Ethernet and access networks.

SDN traffic engineering is used to assign bandwidth to flows. Classic traffic engineering algorithms are well understood however implementations of these algorithms typically take seconds or even minutes to execute. These long execution times force traffic engineering to be used as an off-line tool. We demonstrate a traffic engineering algorithm equivalent to these classic algorithms that executes in millisecond times, allowing traffic engineering to be used as an on-line tool -- much as shortest path computations are used in today's routers.

For the first time, we demonstrate the orchestration of elastic datacenter and inter-datacenter transport network resources using a combination of OpenStack and OpenFlow. Programmatic control allows a datacenter operator to dynamically request optical lightpaths from a transport network operator to accommodate rapid changes of inter-datacenter workflows.

We review recent advances in all-optical OFDM technologies and discuss the performance of a field trial of a 2 Tbit/s Coherent WDM over 124 km with distributed Raman amplification. The results indicate that careful optimisation of the Raman pumps is essential. We also consider how all-optical OFDM systems perform favourably against energy consumption when compared with alternative coherent detection schemes. We argue that, in an energy constrained high-capacity transmission system, direct detected all-optical OFDM with 'ideal' Raman amplification is an attractive candidate for metro area datacentre interconnects with 100 km fibre spans, with an overall energy requirement at least three times lower than coherent detection techniques.

The impact of hybrid erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA)/Raman amplification on a spectrally efficient coherent-wavelength-division-multiplexed (CoWDM) optical communication system is experimentally studied and modeled. Simulations suggested that 23-dB Raman gain over an unrepeatered span of 124 km single-mode fiber would allow a decrease of the mean input power of ~6 dB for a fixed bit-error rate (BER). Experimentally we demonstrated 1.2-dB Q-factor improvement for a 2-Tb/s seven-band CoWDM with backward Raman amplification. The system delivered an optical signal-to-noise ratio of 35 dB at the output of the receiver preamplifier providing a worst-case BER of 2 × 10 -6 over 49 subcarriers at 42.8 Gbaud, leaving a system margin (in terms of Q -factor) of ~4 dB from the forward-error correction threshold.

We propose a new simple method to achieve precise symbol synchronization using one start-of-frame (SOF) symbol in optical fast orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (FOFDM) with subchannel spacing equal to half of the symbol rate per subcarrier. The proposed method first identifies the SOF symbol, then exploits the evenly symmetric property of the discrete cosine transform in FOFDM, which is also valid in the presence of chromatic dispersion, to achieve precise symbol synchronization. We demonstrate its use in a 16.88-Gb/s phase-shifted-keying-based FOFDM system over a 124-km field-installed single-mode fiber link and show that this technique operates well in automatic precise symbol synchronization at an optical signal-to-noise ratio as low as 3 dB and after transmission.

Low-cost, high-capacity optical transmission systems are required for metropolitan area networks. Direct-detected multi-carrier systems are attractive candidates, but polarization mode dispersion (PMD) is one of the major impairments that limits their performance. In this paper, we report the first experimental analysis of the PMD tolerance of a 288Gbit/s NRZ-OOK Coherent Wavelength Division Multiplexing system. The results show that this impairment is determined primarily by the subcarrier baud rate. We confirm the robustness of the system to PMD by demonstrating error-free performance over an unrepeatered 124km field-installed single-mode fiber with a negligible penalty of 0.3dB compared to the back-to-back measurements.

In this paper we report field transmission of a 2 Tbit/s multi-banded Coherent WDM signal over BT Ireland's installed SMF, using EDFA amplification only, with mixed Ethernet (with FEC) and PRBS payloads. To the best of our knowledge, the results obtained represent the highest total capacity transmitted over installed SMF with orthogonal subcarriers. BERs below 10(-5) and no frame-loss were recorded for all 49 subcarriers. Extended BER measurements over several hours showed fluctuations that can be attributed to PMD and to dynamic effects associated with clock instabilities.

We review various electronic dispersion compensation techniques based on full-field detection, and show the potential of these methods to applications in 10Gbit/s dispersioncompensating-fiber free transparent optical networks up to 2000km.

We investigate full-field detection-based maximum- likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE) for chromatic dispersion compensation in 10 Gbit/s OOK optical communication systems. Important design criteria are identified to optimize the system performance. It is confirmed that approximately 50% improvement in transmission reach can be achieved compared to conventional direct-detection MLSE at both 4 and 16 states. It is also shown that full-field MLSE is more robust to the noise and the associated noise amplifications in full-field reconstruction, and consequently exhibits better tolerance to nonoptimized system parameters than full-field feedforward equalizer. Experiments over 124 km spans of field-installed single-mode fiber without optical dispersion compensation using full-field MLSE verify the theoretically predicted performance benefits.

We experimentally demonstrate the use of full-field electronic dispersion compensation (EDC) to achieve a bit error rate of 5times10- 5 at 22.3 dB optical signal-to-noise ratio for single-channel 10 Gbit/s on-off keyed signal after transmission over 496 km field-installed single-mode fibre with an amplifier spacing of 124 km. This performance is achieved by designing the EDC so as to avoid electronic amplification of the noise content of the signal during full-field reconstruction. We also investigate the tolerance of the system to key signal processing parameters, and numerically demonstrate that single-channel 2160 km single mode fibre transmission without in-line optical dispersion compensation can be achieved using this technique with 80 km amplifier spacing and optimized system parameters.