Flexible optical infrastructure for Ethernet transport: Solutions and enabling technologies in the ICT STRAUSS project

Cloud applications and the global delivery of Ethernet services require a scalable, reliable, virtualizable and cost/energy efficient optical transport infrastructure able to support data rates beyond 100 Gb/s. The ICT STRAUSS project addresses the requirement of future optical infrastructures for Ethernet transport beyond 100 Gb/s, by combining two network switching technologies, namely Optical Packet Switching (OPS) and flexible Optical Circuit Switching (OCS). In this paper, cost/energy-efficient solutions and technology enablers are presented, specifically dealing with data plane aspects, such as the design and development of sliceable bandwidth variable transponders (S-BVT), fixed-length variable-capacity OPS, flexi-grid optical switching nodes and OPS/OCS integrated interface.