Flexible Optical Circuit Switched Network Architecture Based on Tunable SFP+ Transceivers for Reconfigurable Low-Latency 5G/6G Networks

A flexibly reconfigurable optical circuit switched edge network architecture relying on wavelength-tunable SFP+ transceivers is presented for the first time for reconfigurable, low-latency 5G/6G networks. The proposed solution employs traditional cost-effective, fixed wavelength 10G SFP+ transceivers as grey optics towards the access side of the network and programmable tunable 10G SFP+ transceivers at the edge part of the network at the Central Office premises, while allowing for flexible reconfiguration of the edge network all-passively via an additional AWG wavelength demultiplexer. The proposed solution allows to reconfigurably interconnect different access network end points to different processing and storage services or the core/metro network, with remote management and monitoring capabilities. The main component of the proposed network solution exploits a two-port Smart Network Interface Card (Smart NIC) X6 Bluefield prototype by NVIDIA and a set of commercial 10G SFP transceivers. The operation of the network bridge is experimentally demonstrated for the first time, being fully characterized in terms of broadband wavelength support across the whole C-band and fast packet-slot operation within slots of 817 ms duration.