Software-Defined Transceivers in Dynamic Access Networks

Software-defined transceivers offer flexibility, increased resilience to channel impairments, and an upgrade path for the future transmission systems. Such transceivers have been discussed in the literature for several years and are now about to be established in long-haul optical communications. In access networks, however, the circumstances are different. Here, a great variety of transceiver and network architectures has been developed. The hardware implementations impose various limitations on the benefits that are usually associated with software-defined transceivers. So the question is: Will software-defined transceivers be of equal importance in dynamic access networks? And, as fundamental limitations mainly originate in the modulation and detection techniques, which hardware implementations would be most promising for software-defined transceivers?