DISCUS: an end-to-end solution for ubiquitous broadband optical access

Abstract

Fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) has promised to increase the capacity in telecommunications access networks for well over thirty years. While it is widely recognized that optical fibre based access networks will be a necessity in the short to medium term future, its large upfront cost and regulatory issues are pushing many operators to further postpone its deployment, while installing intermediate, unambitious solutions such as Fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC). Such high investment cost of both network access and core capacity upgrade often derives from poor planning strategies that do not consider the necessity to adequately modify the network architecture to fully exploit the cost benefit that a fibrecentric solution can bring.DISCUS is a European Framework 7 Integrated Project that, building on optical-centric solutions such as Long-reach passive optical access and flat optical core, aims to deliver a cost-effective architecture for ubiquitous broadband services. DISCUS analyses, designs and demonstrates end-toend architectures and technologies capable of saving cost and energy by reducing the number of electronic terminations in the network, and sharing the deployment costs among a larger number of users, compared to current fibre access systems. This paper describes the network architecture and the supporting technologies behind DISCUS, giving an overview of the concepts and methodologies that will be used to deliver our end-to-end network solution.

A Europe-wide demonstration of fast network restoration with OpenFlow

“…This work is supported in part by the Science Foundation of Ireland through the CTVR CSET grant 10/CE/I1853 and in part by the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n. 318137 (Collaborative project DISCUS [6]). …”

SDN Enabled Dynamically Reconfigurable High Capacity Optical Access Architecture for Converged Services

“…An end-to-end network design, which considers access, metro and core networks, can provide a more economically scalable architecture solution that is better able to cope with the future data traffic growth and also able to support the ubiquitous delivery of high speed services to customers regardless of type or location [1]. The number of network interfaces and switches can be reduced by using a fully meshed flat optical core, thus reducing cost and power consumption.…”

On the dimensioning of survivable optical metro/core networks with dual-homed access

“…One possibility to protect customers from being disconnected after a feeder fiber cut or a CO failure is to use dual-homing. This is for example the architectural option embraced by the FP7 project DISCUS [1], where the first stage splitting node, referred to as a Local Exchange (LE), is connected to two different Metro/Core (M/C) nodes using disjoint feeder fibers, protecting the access segment against feeder fiber and/or M/C node failures. Fig.…”