Silicon Photonics for 5G and Future Networks

Abstract

The evolution of mobile radio technologies towards the realization and deployment of 5G networks is creating relevant opportunities in the Industry and Society worldwide. On the other hand, the network infrastructure that will have to sustain many applications, including the ones requiring challenging network performance, in different terms, is leading to a network transformation and the capacity to handle bigger and bigger volumes of traffic at a reasonable cost and consumption of energy. Photonic technology will play a key role in 5G networks in different segments. In 5G transport it will allow the transmission and routing of huge amounts of data traffic at an acceptable cost, and the transformation of the radio access network. In data center photonic interconnect and switching will allow the realization of new architecture able to strongly reduce the energy consumption while providing high level of flexibility in resource utilization. In future HW platform photonic chip-to-chip interconnect will allow a significant increase of bandwidth density so leading to dramatically scale up the global capacity of those platforms. In addition, photonics is a valid technology to achieve some functions of future radio systems that will enable the further evolution towards what will be the 6th generation of mobile networks. In all the above integrated photonics, and particularly silicon photonics, will be the key technology to realize components and modules at the right costs, while greatly reducing energy consumption and footprint and the desired performance.