Flexible and Efficient Network Slicing for Integrated Optical Metro Networks with Diverse Access Applications

Next generation optical metro networks need to serve heterogeneous access traffic with guaranteed quality of service (QoS) and lower CAPEX and OPEX. In this context, an integrated network infrastructure enabling multiple services access and network slicing is necessary. In this paper, we investigate recent research efforts on network slicing in optical metro networks, the MTN and M-OTN. These technologies have limitations in flexible network resource slicing and efficient bandwidth utilization. Therefore, we propose a new all optical metro network SiMON for achieving flexibility in network slicing and efficiency in bandwidth utilization. In addition, we theoretically investigate the SiMON in achieving end-to-end deterministic latency. A jitter reduction method for SiMON network slices is proposed by formulating the latency components of its communication paths. Theoretical analysis and numerical studies support that the SiMON outperforms the MTN in flexible network resource slicing, and achieves higher bandwidth efficiency than the M-OTN. Moreover, an experimental setup of the SiMON system has been implemented by FPGA. Experimental results show that the SiMON achieves 96.5% of bandwidth utilization with dynamic adjustable network slicing. Below 2
$\mu s$
jitter is achieved in the SiMON network slices under burst traffic, and below 0.2
$\mu s$
jitter has been achieved for constant frame rate traffic with short frame lengths.