Photonic Gateway and Protocol-Independent End-to-End Optical-Connection Provisioning in All-Photonic Metro-Access Converged Network

The All-Photonics Metro-Access Converged Network (APN) aims to achieve a flat and simple architecture that even covers access areas and represents the evolution of optical transport. Electrical processing functions such as exchange, multiplexing, and switching are uniformly placed at the border of the network segments, i.e., access, metro, and core networks, in current optical networks. These functions are placed in Data Centric Infrastructure (DCI) and accessed only when needed in the APN. By flexibly providing direct optical connections between user premises and/or DCI according to requests from users and services, the APN creates new types of use cases requiring end-to-end guaranteed wide-bandwidth and/or extremely low latency and jitter along with an information-computing platform. To provide optical paths originating from user terminals that launch client signals using protocols preferable to their applications, we propose a configuration for a novel optical edge node, the Photonic Gateway (GW), and a procedure based on remote control of user terminals to establish end-to-end optical paths that are independent of the client signal protocol. To verify these, we present results of a proof-of-concept experimental demonstration of establishing end-to-end optical paths. An auxiliary management control channel is employed in the protocol-independent access control method. We also describe future challenges facing the Photonic GW that must be addressed.