Integrating FlexE with Wavelength-Selective Optical Networks: P2P versus P2MP Transceivers

Traditional Flexible Ethernet (FlexE) architecture based on point-to-point transceivers (P2P-TRXs) struggles to efficiently accommodate the prevailing hub-and-spoke (H&S) traffic in today’s metro/access networks due to their limited traffic aggregation capability. Recently, coherent point-to-multipoint transceivers (P2MP-TRXs), with their capability to simultaneously reach multiple destinations and their flexible subcarrier-level scheduling, have exhibited inherent advantages for handling H&S traffic. Moreover, P2MP-TRXs offer comparable unit costs to P2P-TRXs, making them a promising alternative. In this paper, we study the synergistic benefits between FlexE and P2MP-TRXs, namely, FlexE-P2MP, and compare it with two baseline architectures: FlexE with P2P-TRXs (FlexE-P2P) and link aggregation groups with P2MP-TRXs (LAG-P2MP). Extensive simulations validate the advantages of FlexE-P2MP in terms of resource efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and scalability.