5G Driving Increased Bandwidth Demands
According to Cisco’s Annual Internet Report, globally, there will be 1.4 billion total 5G connections by 2023.  Network infrastructure being deployed to support 5G is driving bandwidths higher than legacy infrastructure can support based on traditional optical transmission technology. 5G networks are expected to have traffic from a higher number of endpoints to aggregate, compared to legacy 4G LTE. These drivers for increased bandwidth [demand] are creating a challenge for legacy optical service provider edge and access infrastructure to support this traffic.

The application of coherent technology to the existing network infrastructure may be a competitive differentiator for service providers looking to support the scale and capacity needed in the 5G era.

Coherent Moves into Edge and Access
Much progress has been made over the past decade to reduce the size, power and cost of coherent solutions which has enabled its evolution from supporting long-haul to metro networks. More recently, requirements from data center network operators for high-capacity, high-density, solutions in pluggable form factors widely used in switch and router slots have driven industry-wide investments into ultra-compact, low-power and economical coherent solutions that can be manufactured in high volumes.

Coherent solutions have very good receiving sensitivity, and are extremely tolerant to fiber types, chromatic dispersion, polarization mode dispersion (PMD), and back reflections, which can simplify operational deployment in edge and access networks. In particular, providers offering 5G wireless and enterprise services, can benefit from coherent technology because it has ample optical margins which can easily handle the condition and reaches of the access fiber plant resulting in shorter provisioning times.

Acacia’s Edge and Access Portfolio
With the coming of 5G and edge computing, the time is right for coherent optics to take the next step and migrate to edge and access networks. Acacia has a long-standing track record of driving coherent into new market applications by delivering the technology, scalability, feature set, and innovation that service providers need to maintain and grow their networks over time. Leveraging our 10 years of high-performance coherent transmission expertise, Acacia recently announced a portfolio of products to address 5G wireless X-haul applications.   This portfolio includes:

• A coherent bi-directional pluggable optical module for cable and 5G wireless X-haul applications. Acacia recently published a white paper on how coherent bi-directional modules can enable cable and 5G network providers to easily meet rising bandwidth demands in fiber limited networks.
• A 100G coherent point-to-point edge and access solution for 5G Wireless X-haul and Enterprise Services. Acacia published a white paper that examines the constraints that prohibit legacy point-to-point edge/access solutions from scaling to higher bandwidths, and discusses how coherent optical solutions can provide operational and scalability benefits in these networks when increasing bandwidth to 100Gbps and beyond.
• A 100G coherent DWDM module for new architectures in access networks, such as cable/fiber deep and 5G wireless X-haul applications. Acacia’s new 100G coherent DWDM module was designed to provide a scalable traffic aggregation solution, as well as an upgrade path to migrate from existing 10G DWDM networks to higher-performing 100G coherent links in access networks to boost capacity by a factor of ten.

All of Acacia’s edge and access solutions leverage its 3D Siliconization approach, which utilizes high-volume manufacturing processes and benefits from the maturity of Acacia’s silicon photonics technology.

5G Transport & Network Strategies Virtual Event
With the completion of 3GPP Release 16 this summer, 5G moves into an exciting new phase of advanced use cases and rich applications for consumers and, increasingly, enterprises.  This week, Light Reading’s 5G Transport & Networking Strategies Digital Symposium will discuss this, and more, and Acacia is excited to be speaking at this event.  If you plan to attend, don’t miss Tom Williams, Acacia’s VP of Marketing, on the panel “Transport Architecture Evolution for 5G Phase 2 Services” on Thursday, Nov 5th at 1:20 pm.

If you want to learn more about Acacia’s growing portfolio of edge and access solutions, feel free to contact us.

Nice, France here we come! The Acacia team is excited to attend NGON & DCI Europe 2018 this month for the fifth year in a row. There is always something fun to do in Nice, from attending NGON and the annual beach party at le galet to taking in the some of the local architecture designed by Buzzi, Bernasconi, and Baptiste.

We, of course, most look forward to hearing updates from industry luminaries about the future of optical networking and discussing Acacia Communications’ optical interconnect solutions and how they help meet the demands of today and tomorrow’s optical networks. We think some of this year’s hot topics will be:

• Addressing the need to grow capacity in access and edge networks with coherent ZR optics solutions
• Optimizing multi-haul network capacity
• Expanding data center interconnect bandwidth to 400G and beyond
• Leveraging coherent pluggable modules for applications including access, metro, and DCI to help reduce CapEX and OpEx and accelerate time to market
• Using coherent optics in wireless backhaul for 4G/5G

We look forward to connecting with our peers to discuss these topics. To schedule a meeting with Acacia Communications, please submit a request through our contact form.

You can follow our updates from the show on Twitter @AcaciaComms or #NGON2018.

We look forward to seeing you in Nice!

Transmission reaches for metro applications have to be above 50 km for metro/access and below 1000 km for metro/regional applications. This requires compact, scalable, cost-efficient, and easy-to-use digital coherent transport solutions such as the Acacia CFP2 module.

Figure 1: CFP2 coherent module

Acacia’s engineering team led by Hongbin Zhang recently demonstrated real-time transmission of 16 Tb/s (80x200Gb/s) over 1020km TeraWave ULL fiber with 170km span length using the 200Gb/s CFP2 module. The length, while much longer than typical metro/regional spans, was chosen to stress the OSNR budget while showing achievable amplifier spacing with ultra-low loss fiber. The results showed a record low power consumption less than 0.1W/Gbps. This is the lowest reported power consumption per bit for coherent optical transceivers.

Figure 2: Circulating loop setup for transmission experiments.

For the purpose of this experiment the CFP2 module was implemented in multi-source agreement (MSA) 107.5 mm x 41.5 mm form factor. Test specifics include:

• To test the 200Gb/s transmission performance as a function of OSNR for PM-8QAM on a 50GHz grid (4 bits/s/Hz SE) and PM-16QAM on a 37.5GHz grid (5.33 bits/s/Hz SE), we placed the 4 CFP2 channels next to each other in the middle of the C-band. One of the middle CFP2 channels was selected by a 50GHz optical demux in front of the coherent receiver and the real-time BER was measured as a function of received OSNR by varying the EDFA output power and subsequently converted into Q2-factor.
• To test the transmission performance as a function of the wavelength, we determined the Q2-factor from the measured real-time BER of the two middle channels among 4 consecutive CFP2 50GHz-spaced channels as they are moved across the C-band.

Relying on pluggable CFP2 transceiver modules, we were able to demonstrate successful 200Gb/s real-time transmission of 80 PM-8QAM and PM-16QAM channels at 4 bits/s/Hz spectral efficiency over 1020 km distance using very long 170km spans of TeraWave ULL fiber showing 2.8dB and 1.2dB Q²-margin, respectively. We were also able to prove an increase in system capacity as well as a decrease in power consumption per bit for coherent optical transceivers.

The research paper, published by Optics EXPRESS, is available to read or download here.