METRO High bandwidth, 5G Application-aware optical network

The overall Metro-Haul objective is to architect and design cost-effective, energy-efficient, agile and programmable metro networks that are scalable for 5G access and future requirements, encompassing the design of all-optical metro nodes (including full compute and storage capabilities), which interface effectively with both 5G access and multi-Tbit/s elastic core networks.

Metro-Haul has taken the 5G KPIs and already determined their implication for the optical network with these 5 targets: (i) 100 x more 5G capacity supported over the same optical fibre infrastructure, (ii) 10 times less energy consumption, (iii) Latency-aware metro network in which latency-sensitive slices are handled at the metro edge ensuring the metro network adds no additional latency, (iv) End to end SDN-based management framework enabling fast configuration time to set up or reconfigure services handling 5G applications, specifically 1 minute for simple network path set-up and 10 minutes for full installation of a new VNF and 1 hour for setting up a new virtual network slice and (v) reduction in CAPEX of a factor of 10, plus a reduction in OPEX of at least 20%.

TU/e will design, develop, and experimentally assess a novel edge node in the METRO-HAUL architecture