Field-trial demonstration of cost efficient sub-wavelength service through integrated packet/circuit hybrid network [invited]

Carriers are under constant pressure to meet the ever-increasing bandwidth demand while reducing cost per bit, enhancing network throughput, and offering a large variety of services. Hybrid packet and circuit network technologies are being widely investigated and considered as a solution for offering both the high network throughput of the packet domain and wavelength services, i.e., a low fixed latency and zero packet loss. To enable carriers to serve a higher number of customers requiring wavelength services, optical transport network (OTN)-based sub-wavelength switching is adopted to support finer granularity with similar performance to full wavelength services. However, OTN is not able to perform statistical multiplexing and achieve the throughput efficiency of packet networks. In this work an integrated hybrid optical network field-trial is described to demonstrate the ability to both aggregate and transport sub-wavelength circuits, and offer high throughput efficiency by statistically multiplexing traffic on transport wavelengths. Results show the transport of sub-wavelength services with packet-delay variation limited to only 15 ns and 82.4% wavelength utilization using statistical multiplexing.