A Comparison of Subwavelength Optical Switching Networks for LTE Mobile Backhauling
06 July 2014
Optical slot switching provides statistical multiplexing is an energy-efficient fashion. In this paper, we propose and study the dimensioning of two such sub-wavelength granularity optical transport technologies applied to mobile traffic backhauling in LTE cellular networks. In particular, we focus on Time-Domain Wavelength Interleaved Network (TWIN), which exploits optical slot switching in mesh networks, and on Packet Optical Add/Drop Multiplexers (POADM), which exploits optical slot switching over rings. TWIN and POADM are compared for the first time in terms of the network planning cost, in a small but realistic mobile backhaul scenario. The traffic in LTE is composed of unicast and multicast part; the latter can be driven by IPTV and Coordinated MultiPoint (CoMP), a radio interference canceling technique. We propose 3 different methods to support the multicast part of the demand. Simulations indicate which multicasting technique is efficient in terms of the needed resources, and to what networking scenario each of the optical slot switching is best suited.
