An All-Optical Metro Network Architecture and QoS-Aware Wavelength Allocation Study for Converged Fixed, Mobile, and Edge Computing Multi-Granular Traffic

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce an all-optical metro network architecture, called MOON, to serve converged multigranular traffic from fixed, mobile, and edge computing services. Since traffic is characterized by high dynamicity and diverse access requirements, MOON uses network slicing to provide quality of service (QoS) aware wavelength allocation to fulfill the various applications traffic demands. MOON incorporates hybrid optical switching (HOS) combining optical circuit switching (OCS) and optical time slotted switching (OTS) capabilities that appropriately maps different traffic types to them. Specifically, the OCS network slice explicitly serves aggregated traffic of long duration and high volume, while OTS network slice serves short bursty traffic. In order to provide flexibility, separate sets of wavelengths are used for OCS and OTS traffic service, both within a metro-access network (MAN) (intra-MAN) and between different MANs (inter-MAN). We extensively study the required number of wavelengths to efficiently serve OCS and OTS traffic for intra- and inter-MAN communication scenarios, taking into account their specific traffic access requirements in an effort to optimize wavelengths utilization. In our study, we assume nonblocking OCS communication for immediate access; therefore the number of required OCS wavelengths depends only on the number of nodes, while the number of required OTS wavelengths to obtain a desired QoS and latency level is independent from the number for OCS wavelengths. Simulation results show that within an OTS intra-MAN we achieve end-to-end (E2E) latency in submilliseconds scale, suitable for dynamic bursty traffic, while it is an decreasing function of the number of used OTS wavelengths.