The Benefits of Photonic Integration in Next-Gen Transport & Switching Systems

For years, core networks received little attention while operators focused their investments on upgrading their metro core, aggregation and access networks to deal with IP traffic growth and new services on both the wireline and wireless side.

Over the past couple years, however, we have seen a core network renaissance begin. With upgrades in metro and access networks complete, operators are finding that the core network has become the bottleneck. As operators invest in the next round of core networks, they will take advantage of the latest technolo-gies available in order to squeeze the greatest efficiencies out of their finite bandwidth and to future-proof their networks against continued traffic growth. The first move in this direction is being seen as super-channel line card implementa-tions beginning to address the emerging 100G market, and competing directly with non-integrated implementations of 100G.

This paper looks at the evolution of core networks, with an emphasis on the following technologies: 100G transport, Switched OTN, Super channels and Photonic integration.

In particular, we focus on photonic integration as enabling and/or improving the other technologies.