Moving the Network to the Cloud: the Cloud Central Office Revolution and its Implications for the Optical Layer
M. Ruffini, F. Slyne

TL;DR
This paper reviews the shift towards cloud-based virtualisation of central offices in telecom networks, highlighting architectures, functionalities, and challenges for future cost-efficient, flexible, and converged network deployments.
Contribution
It provides a comprehensive overview of current disaggregation and virtualisation trends, architectures, and functionalities enabling the cloudification of central offices and access networks.
Findings
Cloud-CO architectures enable cost savings and flexibility.
Virtual DBA mechanisms improve PON performance.
Network convergence facilitates multi-operator resource sharing.
Abstract
SDN and NFV have recently changed the way we operate networks. By decoupling control and data plane operations and virtualising their components, they have opened up new frontiers towards reducing network ownership costs and improving usability and efficiency. Recently, their applicability has moved towards public telecommunications networks, with concepts such as the cloud-CO that have pioneered its use in access and metro networks: an idea that has quickly attracted the interest of network operators. By merging mobile, residential and enterprise services into a common framework, built around commoditised data centre types of architectures, future embodiments of this CO virtualisation concept could achieve significant capital and operational cost savings, while providing customised network experience to high-capacity and low-latency future applications. This tutorial provides an…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
