METRO-HAUL

Link to project website: https://metro-haul.eu

Social media: Twitter @MetroHaul

Contact: metro-haul-contact@5g-ppp.eu

Objective

The overall Metro-Haul objective is to architect and design cost-effective, energy-efficient, agile and programmable metro networks that are scalable for 5G access and future requirements, encompassing the design of all-optical metro nodes (including full compute and storage capabilities), which interface effectively with both 5G access and multi-Tbit/s elastic core networks.

Metro-Haul has taken the 5G KPIs and already determined their implication for the optical network with these 5 targets: (i) 100 x more 5G capacity supported over the same optical fibre infrastructure, (ii) 10 times less energy consumption, (iii) Latency-aware metro network in which latency-sensitive slices are handled at the metro edge ensuring the metro network adds no additional latency, (iv) End to end SDN-based management framework enabling fast configuration time to set up or reconfigure services handling 5G applications, specifically 1 minute for simple network path set-up and 10 minutes for full installation of a new VNF and 1 hour for setting up a new virtual network slice and (v) reduction in CAPEX of a factor of 10, plus a reduction in OPEX of at least 20%.

Achievements

The Metro-Haul objectives include open cost-effective, energy-efficient, agile and programmable metro network infrastructure that will support current and future 5G service requirements. As Metro-Haul innovation progresses, the following key milestones, capabilities and events outline our significant interim achievements for the project:

• Development of open hardware – Disaggregated optical metro network nodes, enabled with field programmable sliceable bandwidth/bitrate variable transceivers;
• Intelligent control and orchestration – Developing an innovative Control, Management and Orchestration stack for control of Metro Optical Network infrastructure was a key goal of Metro-Haul. Our optical network control & management framework includes network telemetry capabilities underpinned by a machine learning component called the Monitoring and Data Analytics (MDA) system. The MDA system represents a significant leap in proactive network monitoring and resource optimisation;

To demonstrate both practical and commercial applicability of Metro-Haul innovations, we have developed key demonstrations of our enabling technologies. Allowing project research and industrial community to verify and validate the feasibility and applicability of our core technologies in real environments. By the second year of the project, we have had the following interim results and demonstrations:

• Demonstration at ECOC 2018 – A demo based on the CORD platform enhanced within the Metro-Haul project to add features to control an optical transport network composed of disaggregated elements and using the MDA system, capable of proactively detecting anomalies in the network.
• Demonstration at EUCNC 2019 – This demo highlighted how Metro-Haul is leveraging multi-layer network slicing for improving public safety in enabled cities and SmartCity infrastructure.

A key aspect of Metro-Haul is innovation collaboration and exploitation between industry and academia, as well as between network operators and equipment manufacturers. Significantly, the innovation results emerging from the first two years of the project are very encouraging. One of the first innovation results presented by ADVA and British Telecom, which highlighted joint work on how edge computing and network slicing techniques can enable emerging 5G applications to the advantage of network operators and their customers.

Our dissemination and standardisation activities have also been hugely successful with more than 200 publications across leading international research and industry conferences, journals, workshops, and magazine articles. At many events, we ran booths and Q/A sessions while demonstrating key technology innovations.

The project has been responsible for two seminal workshops, designed and led by Metro-Haul partners:

• “The Optical Masterclass Series – METRO-HAUL” workshop at the Next Generation Optical Networks (NGON) Conference (2019)
• “Photonic Technologies in 5G and Beyond” workshop at the European Conference on Networks and Communications Conference (2019)

In addition to the research and industrial dissemination activity, we have also led and contributed to various open and traditional Standards Development Organisations (SDOs), including ETSI, MEF, IETF, OpenROADM, CORD, ONOS, ITU-T, 3GPPP and Open Config. Key SDO technical highlights include:

• ITU-T “Recommendation” for interfaces in 100-Gbit/s coherent transmission systems;
• ITU-T Specification for optical measurements (for example, of the relationship between the OSNR penalty and EVM for various impairments);
• ITU-T Recommendation for the theoretical background for optimum parameter choice;
• Open ROADM resource modeling;
• An IETF Enhanced VPN Framework;
• An IETF Applicability Statement of Abstraction and Control of Transport Networks to Network Slicing;
• Various open-source code contributions that will be made available for wider industry use as the project continues.

Finally, the project partners are supporting other European initiatives such as the 5G Infrastructure Public Private Partnership (5GPPP), with the active participation of key working groups, and direct contributions to the 5GPPP “Architecture” White Paper, and “‘Cloud-Native and Vertical Services” White Paper.

Project Participants: