Optical Ethernet - Flexible Optical Metro Networks
01 January 2017
Enhanced flexibility in optical transport networks is a key requirement to support dynamic traffic load in packet based networks. Today, flexibility is reached by packet switches connected by static point-to-point transport connections. Wide-stretched synchronization patterns, line coding schemes, and Forward Error Correction frames (FEC) prohibit flexibility right in the transport. We introduce a new optical transport concept that combines packet aggregation with a multipoint-to-point line coding and FEC processing. This way we avoid the quadratic full mesh scalability problem of other aggregated switching technologies like e.g. wavelength switching. Based on the new transport concept we build an Optical Ethernet bus with the flexibility of a distributed Ethernet switch and the performance of leading edge optical transport.
