Transparent service delivery in elastic metro/access networks with cost-effective programmable transceivers

In this paper, we present and experimentally validate a transparent signal delivery scheme using programmable sliceable bandwidth/bit rate variable transceivers (S-BVTs), for converged optical access/metro networks. A programmable transceiver based on discrete multitone (DMT) directly modulated vertical cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) and direct detection (DD) is proposed to efficiently increase the cost-effectiveness and scalability of the network. Variable data rates are enabled for a maximum optical spectrum occupancy of 9 GHz, while coping with a minimum power budget of 20 dB in the access segment. This allows to fully exploit system flexibility while enabling photonic integration.