SAFARI (Scalable And Flexible optical Architecture for Reconfigurable Infrastructure):
SAFARI is an EU-Japan coordinated R&D project funded by the European Commission and Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC), Japan. It will allow European and Japanese research institutions and industries to develop highly scalable & flexible optical data transport networks for the long term future.
Context and motivation
Unrelenting exponential data traffic growth and bandwidth intensive applications are creating an urgent demand for highly scalable & flexible optical transport networks (OTNs). SAFARI will realise such OTNs by developing programmable optical hardware and Space-Division Multiplexing (SDM)-based optical component technologies that allow for multiple independent data pathways through the same optical fibre, greatly enhancing its data carrying capacity.
Challenge
Today’s digital coherent optical transport technologies based on digital signal processing (DSP) have allowed the commercial realisation of 100 Gbit/s/channel long-haul transport systems capable of providing more than 8 Tbit/s capacity per fibre in installed commercial networks. The introduction of such dynamic DSP functionality has dramatically reduced the network provisioning cost and inventory. However, capacity demands are ever increasing, and to address those requirements in the near future, it becomes indispensable to introduce various types of transport flexibility, for example in modulation format and subcarrier number for super channel transport. Such flexibility will be enabled by progress in DSP functionality in conjunction with flexible optical hardware. Control technologies to manage flexible hardware and transport will thus be urgently needed to provide telecom-carrier-grade reliability for the future OTNs with capacity beyond 10 Tbit/s. Furthermore, within the next 10 years, we will encounter the fundamental capacity limit of conventional single-mode fibres (SMFs) at around 100 Tbit/s due to optical fibre nonlinearity and limitations on the maximum allowable launched power.
Solution
SAFARI aims to develop programmable optical hardware, and SDM-based optical components capable of realising highly scalable and flexible OTNs. Specifically SAFARI will:
- Develop programmable optical hardware allowing novel multi-flow transport functions which is scalable to at least 400 Gbit/s/channel transport, and implement the critical interworking capability required between the software-defined network (SDN) layer and the physical layer.
- Develop SDM-based optical transport technologies based on super-dense, high-count multicore fibres (MCFs) and multicore erbium-doped optical fibre amplifiers (MC-EDFAs) capable of Pbit/s level operation.
- Undertake system experiments on scalable and flexible OTNs based on the technology developed within the project. Specific attention will be focussed on demonstrating that the SDN-controlled programmability developed is compatible with both existing SMF transmission systems and future SDM-based systems, allowing for a graceful upgrade scenario.
- Bring together major organisations in both the EU nations and Japan in order to develop the most advanced enabling technologies, to demonstrate their feasibility in an international setting, and to jointly contribute to international standardisation and forum activities.
Conclusion of the Action
By the end of the project, as detailed below, SAFARI proved the viability of the above approach for developing super-capacity OTNs capable of supporting several orders of magnitude increase in capacity with great flexibility in term of control and management. The project has led to a potential pathway to the industrial development of software defined optical networks based on SDM.
