A Techno-Economic Study of Optical Network Disaggregation Employing Open Source Software Business Models for Metropolitan Area Networks

Abstract

This work provides a techno-economic evaluation of optical disaggregation architectures in the context of Metropolitan Area Networks. The study compares two optical disaggregation options (partial vs. total) against the legacy benchmark where optical equipment is subject to vendor lock-in, as it is deployed in most networks today. We show that emerging opensource software projects within the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) ecosystem can potentially yield significant cost savings for medium-and large-size network operators, while they can introduce extra flexibility and agility to network operations and service deployments.

Metropolitan Optical Networks: A Survey on New Architectures and Future Trends

“…In the D-WDM domain, functions related to the transport of these analog channels are implemented in equipment such as multi-degree ROADMs (MD-ROADMs), line terminals (LTs), multiplexers (MUXs), and inline optical amplifiers (ILAs). In the D-WDM domain, the client's digital signals are adapted to the analog channels of the A-WDM domain, as is the case with the transponders (TPs) used in point-to-point (P2P) connections, muxponders (MPs) used to combine multiple sub-rates, and switchponders (SPs) that are cards that integrate an OTN switch with DWDM transponder [14]. Such equipment will be highlighted in the Subsection II-B.…”

“…As these content delivery centers will be increasingly distributed throughout the metro network, although it is possible to take advantage of the equipment already installed [28], it is not feasible only to scale the physical resources in operation to meet the new demands [29]. New equipment has been designed to ensure capacity and dynamism with efficiency and low cost, such as transceivers [30], [31], [32], [33] and optical switches [34] based on space division multiplexing (SDM) and multi-core fibers [35], mainly following a modular [36] and disaggregated [14] approach. Equipment that exploits SDM uses the spatial dimension to simultaneously deliver different data streams while creating parallel spatial channels.…”

Comprehensive model for technoeconomic studies of next-generation central offices for metro networks

“…assumed at a −50% discount with respect to its legacy counterpart, as follows from [5,56,57]. Essentially, such a discount is justified by the fact that both equipment SW and its integration is provided separately.…”

“…In particular, the SW cost in Option 3 is evaluated by assuming a SW development of 100,000 lines of code (LOC) for the whole customized carrier-class SDN controller environment based on ONOS plus the network edge mediator (NEM) for the CO [58]. The SW cost results in 500 CU, under the assumption of a SW productivity of 4 LOC per hour, and the cost of a SW engineer is 0.02 CU per hour, as follows from [5,56,57].…”

“…The HW has the same characteristics for the three options, but in Option 3 the optical layer is assumed disaggregated. A discount of 20% in the disaggregated WDM HW with respect to the prices of the aggregated devices has been applied, as shown in [56,57]. However, an additional investment in SW is necessary for the disaggregated case, but medium or large size operators can share this cost among a large number of equipment.…”