Multi-Tb/s photonic transceivers for metro optical network connectivity evolution

Metro area network (MAN) connectivity is rapidly evolving towards a much more dense, complex and diverse scenario to be dynamically addressed with flexible cost-efficient and high-capacity technology and architecture solutions, dealing with an even more open and disaggregated paradigm. In this work, sliceable bandwidth/bitrate variable transceiver (S-BVT) architectures adopting modular approach and suitable photonic technologies (such as VCSEL), enabling to efficiently and dynamically exploit both spectral and spatial dimensions, are discussed, considering design, implementation, cost and flexibility aspects. Recent numerical and experimental results are reported, showing how to enable scalability towards supporting multi-Tb/s connectivity in flexible and dynamic large MAN.