ALLEGRO will develop an autonomous and HW sliceable optical network that not only enables secure and energy-efficient services, but it also adds new capabilities such as:
- Ultra-low latency and low-energy switching solutions to support edge computing by deploying:
- Smart, coherent transceivers exploiting multi-band & multi-fiber technologies for P2P and P2MP applications, based on e.g., high-speed plasmonic modulators/photodetectors and programmable silicon photonic integrated waveguide meshes.
- Loss-less, energy-efficient transparent photonic integrated optical switches, eliminating OEO conversions, e.g., with on-chip amplification in the O-band for datacom applications.
- Intensive virtualization and a high degree of softwarization to enable flexible and dynamic HW configuration.
- A monitoring, sensing and telemetry plane to alert at both the network infrastructure level as well as at the geographical footprint level.
- A convergence between metro and access domain to reduce cost and power consumption, also by removing unneeded elements in the network as for example employing P2MP pluggables.
- Enhanced optical data plance security by introducing quantum key distribution (QKD) with improved protocol security and better performance, post-quantum cryptography (PQC).
- A deterministic time synchronization mechanism layer for ultra-low latency applications implemented by a HW programmable physical layer.
iPronics Programmable Photonics will provide a reconfigurable and smart photonic interconnect to develop the smart coherent transceiver including data processing in the optical domain (dispersion compensation, noise removal, correction of the polarization fluctuations and equalization of the coherent detection) and an on-chip fibre interrogator, all functions controlled by Software.
Additionally, the same chips will be used to provide a switch operating in the C-band.
More information in Project page Allegro and Project page (EU)
