Full softwarization in optical access networks [Invited]

Abstract

Optical access systems are needed to meet the ever-increasing range of requirements from legacy services to new services. The application of network function virtualization (NFV) to access systems is promising for flexible function deployment and agile service creation, while the softwarization of upper-layer functions has been progressing for the optical line terminal (OLT). To maximize the flexibility, the softwarization of lower-layer functions, including media access control (MAC), physical-layer (PHY) functions, and digital signal processing (DSP), is also being studied. Although one-port 10 Gb/s systems with softwarized real-time 10G-EPON physical coding sublayer (PCS) have already been demonstrated, systems with higher output speeds have not been demonstrated. This paper builds a softwarized four-port 10G-EPON PCS, including scrambling and forward error correction (FEC), on a general-purpose server and evaluates its real-time throughput, latency, and power consumption. We build a demonstration platform with four-port service node interfaces (SNIs) and four-port passive optical network (PON) interfaces using polling-based data transfer and multi-threading. The results show that our platform achieves approximately ${4} \times {10.3125}\;{\rm Gb/s}$ throughput, 0.5 ms round-trip latency, and a 66% reduction in power consumption per port compared to a single-port implementation.