Agile Metropolitan Filterless Optical Networking

The tremendous traffic growth generated by video, cloud, future 5G and beyond services is compelling network operators to re-think network architectures to ensure flexible and efficient service support. Filterless optical networking based on broadcast-and-select nodes and coherent transceivers is considered as a disruptive approach for delivering network agility in a cost-effective manner. The filterless network concept has been widely studied for terrestrial and submarine applications. In this paper, we explore the suitability of filterless architectures in metropolitan networks through a comparative performance analysis with a conventional metro network based on active switching. The results show that a filterless solution with lower, but adequate, network connectivity can achieve up to 36% lower power consumption and up to 45.4% cost reduction at the expense of a 19% higher spectrum usage, which makes the filterless architecture an attractive alternative for metro network deployments.