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Report on the Successful Demonstration of Innovative Basic Technologies for Future Optical Access Network "Elastic Lambda Aggregation Network"
[April 25, 2017]

Report on the Successful Demonstration of Innovative Basic Technologies for Future Optical Access Network "Elastic Lambda Aggregation Network"


Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, CEO: Hiroo Unoura), Hitachi (News - Alert), Ltd. (Hitachi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, President & CEO: Toshiaki Higashihara), Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd. (OKI, Minato-ku, Tokyo, President Shinya Kamagami), Keio University (Keio, Minato-ku, Tokyo, President Professor Atsushi Seike), KDDI (News - Alert) Research, Inc. (KDDI Research, Fujimino-shi, Saitama, president, CEO: Yasuyuki Nakajima) and Furukawa Electric Co., Ltd. (Furukawa Electric, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, President: Keiichi Kobayashi) have jointly challenged the advanced future network for 2030 and beyond by conducting innovative studies on "Elastic Lambda Aggregation Network (E?AN)".
E?AN sets an adaptive modulation OFDM transmission system, which leads to the significant improvement of optical frequency utilization efficiency, into the access (subscriber's home-central office)-metro (central office-central office) network that directly connects the subscriber's home and the metro central offices via fibers and WSSs. Therefore, E?AN provides flexible assignment of the transmission speed and optical frequency bandwidth to support diversified services with different types of traffic, such as internet, enterprise line, and mobile services.
We demonstrated the reliability of E?AN through a prototype testbed network which utilizes optical path provisioning and switching technologies. The demonstration successfully showed, for the first time, that the service accommodated in the failed office was automatically re-connected within 10 sec to another office some 10km away with the same transmission speed as before the failure. The project accomplishments will be presented at an international conference on optical communications, iPOP2017 (The 13th International Conference on IP + OpticalNetwork 2017: Kawasaki-city, Kanagawa, Japan: June 1-2, 2017).



This research and development project was contracted with the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) of Japan under a research contract titled "Research and development of elastic lambda aggregation network."

[Background]
Along with the wider penetration of FTTH (Fiber to the Home) services, efficient operation of a large number of network sets is essential in recent optical access networks. Moreover, the future access network must support, in addition to conventional FTTH service, multiple access services, such as mobile, high-definition video and IoT (Internet of Things) services.
Until now, multiple access services have been provided using distinctly different network infrastructures to meet the disparate service requirements. However, to provide them more efficiently, all services should coexist on the same service-adaptive network that can flexibly meet individual service requirements. If multiple access services share an optical fiber network, high reliability is essential so that the network can keep providing services by autonomous reconfiguration of the network resources remaining after a disaster. Furthermore, high optical frequency utilization efficiency (transmission rate per unit of optical frequency) should also be provided to accommodate a large number of services and subscribers.
From this background, as advanced research studies targeting beyond 2030, the six institutions (NTT (News - Alert), Hitachi, OKI, Keio, KDDI Research, and Furukawa Electric) have been researching E?AN, a service adaptive access-metro network that provides multiple services with high reliability and high optical frequency utilization efficiency.


[Elastic lambda Aggregation Network (E?AN)]
In conventional access networks, the central office equipment (OLT) is located at access central offices close to subscribers' homes. E?AN, on the other hand, transfers the OLT to a metro central office that aggregates the traffic of metro networks. Moreover, E?AN improves the reliability of access-metro networking, which will need to accommodate a huge number of subscribers, by using WSSs to switch optical paths flexibly. This innovative architecture offers lower end-to-end latency and power consumption, since Optical-Electrical-Optical (O-E-O) conversion in the access central office is not needed.
E?AN employs a digital coherent OFDM system with adaptive modulation, a technique that can realize dramatically high optical frequency utilization efficiency and large-scale flexible service allocation by using the elastic control of transmission speed and optical frequency bandwidth. In addition, E?AN applies the world's first dynamic bandwidth allocation algorithm in OLTs. This makes it possible for the users to share the additional bits in a fair manner regardless of optical distribution network (ODN) conditions.

[Future Outlook]
We will work to enhance the maturity and the reliability of basic technologies for E?AN, and will carry out further development activities.


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