A feasible solution to provide cloud computing over optical networks

Cloud computing provides a whole new way to store, access, and exchange information, and introduces new service patterns and business opportunities for network providers and enterprises. Due to the expensive intercommunication among data centers, the difficulty of managing diverse backups, and the cost of operating several data centers, cloud resources are mostly limited to centralized architectures. However, achieving low latency and guaranteeing end-to-end performance are two main challenges in today's cloud computing. Meanwhile, PON-based broadband access networks have been widely considered as one of the most promising solutions for the future telecom access platform that supports residential, enterprise, and mobile backhaul services. The latest research has achieved terabit symmetric capacity that can support up to 800 ONUs at gigabit rates. Therefore, deploying cloud services based on PON access networks provides flexibility in moving services closer to customers so as to ensure low latency and guarantee quality of experience for customers. In this article, we propose, by incorporating PON OLT and ONU physical resources, an infrastructure as a service architecture that enables the delivery of cloud services to end users over PON access networks.