Tutorial on “Switching and routing for spatially and spectrally flexible elastic optical networking”

The traffic carried by core optical networks as well as the per-channel interface rates required by IP routers are growing at a remarkable pace year-over-year. This trend is due to the widespread deployment of fixed and wireless broadband networks as well as huge growth of video-based traffic supported via internet and social media applications. Optical transmission and switching advancements have so far satisfied this huge traffic growth by delivering the content over the network infrastructure in a cost and energy efficient manner utilizing to the maximum extend the capabilities of optoelectronic and photonic subsystems and the available bandwidth of deployed optical fibers. However, we are approaching fast fundamental spectral efficiency limits of single-mode fibers and the scientific and industrial telecommunications community foresees that the growth capabilities of conventional WDM networks operating on a fixed frequency grid are quite limited.