Application-centric, energy-efficient network architecture ACTION, based on virtual optical slice core and deterministic optical access network

The Internet traffic is forecasted to grow at a compound annual rate of 21% from 2013 to 2018, according to surveys carried out by Cisco [1]. Network resources are significantly over-provisioned in today’s networks, and it is quite common to see link utilization in the 30-40% range [2]. Additionally, the multi-media services have widely divergent bandwidth and Quality of Experience (QoE) requirements. Unfortunately, the huge transmission capacity will increase the power consumption of network equipment [3]. Applications Coordinated with Transport, Internet Protocol and Optical Networks (ACTION) [4] has been proposed to realize a multi-QoE, application-centric, and highly energy-efficient network that leverages flexible elastic optical network technologies [5-7]. This paper provides key network technologies for realizing the ACTION, which are a virtual optical slice core network and a Time Division Multiplexing (TDM)-based deterministic active optical access network.