Exploiting general purpose hardware in optical access systems [Invited]

The amazing diversity of new services and applications has initiated a radical change in the telecom operator’s network. Here, we propose a novel edge-access solution that offers highly dynamic and fine granular utilization of wavelength resources, realized by the disaggregated coherent transceivers in edge-access nodes. Through experiments on four 5-Gbit/s quadrature phase-shift keying wavelength channels, we assess, for the first time to our knowledge, the capability of a dynamic multiwavelength channel system on a softwarized real-time platform. We expect that our proposal will significantly enhance system flexibility and scalability, towards the realization of a single converged network that virtualizes dissimilar mobile and fixed network interfaces for the access segment.