Photonic networking across metro and access for future super-broadband services and 6G mobile networks

Abstract

Optical and mobile broadband services have been widely adopted to support various applications including center-to-end and end-to-end communications. This raises further expectations for more and more natural and realistic communications by increasing network bandwidth and reducing latency. To support this evolution, 6G mobile is intended to increase the bandwidth to much over 10 Gbit/s and reducing the end-to-end latency to less than 1 ms. However, electrical processing is the key bottleneck to drastically increasing the bandwidth and reducing the latency in the current network architecture especially when the explosion of power consumption needs to be avoided. This paper discusses future optical network architectures and technologies to resolve the issue. In particular, it focuses on photonic networking to minimize the electrical processing across metro and access sections, and describes the technical challenges.