Impacts

The rapid evolution of the ICT infrastructure is progressively enabling new opportunities to implement innovative services for people. Among the key ingredients of such evolution, it is worth to highlight the capability to manage mission critical services. Autonomous driving, remote surgery, security monitoring, are examples of application that cannot be supported by today networks.
Bandwidth, QoS, and flexibility are part of the PASSION goals and will greatly contribute to this evolution. In fact, the optical metro network constitutes the fundamental infrastructure, driving the future communicating society and providing virtually ubiquitous, ultra-high bandwidth “connectivity”, not only to individual users, but also to connected objects.
PASSION metro network approach can support the future connected society thanks to the development of novel enabling photonic technologies and devices. In fact, these technology developments will be the key to the envisioned high-capacity, scalable, modular, SDM sliceable bandwidth/bitrate variable transport; which will enhance system capacity and reach
Space and spectrum aggregation and switching, enabling the agile generation and routing of high-capacity channels with different levels of aggregation, will be the basis for an autonomous and agile optical network, capable of dynamically deliver services with a guaranteed QoS. Thus, an important part is the SDN-based network control to ensure high-capacity and dynamic connectivity and smooth deployment of the services.

PASSION offers a modular, compact, low-cost and low-power solution for the metro network thanks to the exploitation of VCSELs as light sources and a 3D stacking approach for co-integration of VCSELs and SiPh circuits.
The transmitter/receiver modular concept means that regardless of the number of modules required (or capacity needed) only a single module has to be created. The desired choice of wavelength channels to be deployed can be programmed into the standard module, greatly simplifying the supply chain. The use of single VCSELs for the assembly, will result in higher utilization of fabricated VCSELs without yield-drop due to the use of arrays.
The population of the high capacity switching node with space and wavelength domain switches, where the co-integration of amplifiers is the key feature, will provide at once 1000 times reduction in form-factor for reduced OPEX, as well as more than one order of magnitude improvement in power consumption per fully loaded module. When relating the power to the energy consumption per bit/s, that goes down to an impressive value of order tens of fJ/bit/s due to the high capacity links.

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