On the Capacity and Scalability of Metro Transport Architectures for Ubiquitous Service Delivery
António Eira, Nelson M. S. Costa, João Pedro · 2018
The underlying architectures of 5G services impose a wide array of requirements on the transport networks of the future. On one hand, edge functions are progressively being offloaded onto data-centers in the cloud, while on the other the data-centers themselves are increasingly more distributed in re-purposed central offices. As a result, transport networks in the metro space face traffic requirements increasing in scale and dynamism. As traffic engineering becomes intertwined with storage and compute resource dimensioning, it is important to put into question which type of metro architectures are able to cost-efficiently address these requirements. This paper presents a comparative analysis of reconfigurable/fixed optical add/drop multiplexer (ROADM/FOADM) and filterless architectures in metro ring scenarios, evaluating how the raw capacity requirements, coupled with the more complex traffic patterns induced by virtual network function placement towards the network edge, respond in terms of scalability and flexibility.