On the next generation Elastic Optical Networks: the vision of the European research project IDEALIST

This paper reports on the latest requirements and solutions, carried out within the European research project IDEALIST, regarding elastic optical networks. The main goal of our work is to realize future optical communication infrastructure capable to satisfy the actual dynamic bandwidth demand. To date, current commercial systems are struggling to catch up with exponentially growing traffic demands, mainly fueled by online video and multimedia applications. Within IDEALIST we propose solutions concerning network requirements, physical layer strategies, and optical node architectures for next generation elastic optical networks.