Optical Technology for NFV Converged Networks

Abstract

5G and its evolution towards 6G is unlocking new use cases that will require the reconsideration of the existing network architectures and its operation. As the network will be required to support new service types and radio protocol splits, the traditional physical point to point connections will need to be replaced with a transport network up to the antenna site to guarantee low latency services and high bandwidth. Optical based transport is a key enabler to realize such a convergent network, where the traditional fixed infrastructure in use for mobile services and mobile infrastructure should also support enterprises services. The Software Defined Network (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technology plays a key role to evolve towards digitalization. It allows to simplify the creation of new services and to implement a real decoupling between the infrastructure and the network functions that run virtually, on generic processing units located everywhere in the network. Supporting automation is a key requirement that traditional optical technology is not able to meet. In this paper the reference scenarios for the access network are presented with the analysis of their requirements and the enabling optical solutions based on integrated silicon photonics.