Benefits of optical packet switching for router by-pass in metro networks

This paper builds on previous work [1] on IP off-loading over multi-granular photonic switching technologies to provide an in-depth techno-economic analysis for a real metro scenario. The main contribution of the paper is that it demonstrates a 42% capital cost reduction in favour of the proposed IP-offloading architecture, when compared against currently used, typical all-IP architectures. This is achieved by performing packet transport, aggregation, switching and grooming in the optical layer within an IP off-loading architecture using the Optical Packet Switch and Transport (OPST) technology. Such results show that multi-granular optical technologies are a strong candidate for solving the bottleneck problem caused by video streaming, cloud services and mobility in metropolitan area networks. Finally, the paper also discusses other, cumulative benefit aspects of multi-granular technologies, such as video and next-generation cloud services.