Towards WDM slot switching for aggregation access and metropolitan applications: the ANR N-GREEN project

WDM has been generally proposed to groom wavelengths for transport applications. This paper will describe our attempt to reduce cost and energy consumption of smart network elements, through an extended use of WDM techniques at the data link level. This paper will draw the advantages of this approach and will demonstrate that this new direction is efficient to keep the frequency processing at a reasonable value in the electronic interfaces, to validate optical bypasses concepts even for long haul applications, to reduce the complexity of ROADM systems and to increase the energy efficiency, through a better exploitation of an integrated optical technology and of the efficient use of the available optical bandwidth. This paper demonstrates that by combining components realized for the data com, or for the NGPON2 systems and a parallelism in the optical domain, it is then possible to decrease dramatically the cost of the systems while offering better performance than classical Ethernet technologies.