Integrating Optical and Mobile Networks: A Comprehensive End-to-End Simulation Platform

Communications are crucial in human interactions, the economy, education, and accessing and democratizing various services and information. With a vast physical infrastructure deployed, optical networks have been fundamental in end-to-end broadband communications. They are considered the foundation for future communications in modern society. Next-eneration optical networks are expected to provide broadband services with massive capacity, lower latencies, and improved reliability, supporting various ultra-high bandwidth applications: cloud/edge networking, 8K video services, and digital twins. Optical networks have been playing an increasingly important role in mobile communications. They will be key for 5G/6G networks, given their bandwidth, coverage, synchronization, and low latency requirements. Various technologies are being developed for the convergence of optical-mobile networks to enhance performance, improve energy efficiency, and simplify the network’s design, implementation, and operation. Researchers, vendors, and operators must be able to evaluate these new solutions effectively. They require a robust simulation framework that seamlessly implements the mobile and optical domains and their interactions. As far as we know, no open-source simulator has fulfilled these requirements to date. For this reason, in this paper, we present an optical-mobile unified simulation platform that addresses the convergence of 5G/6G technology and optical networks. This tool enables academia and industry members to test new optical-mobile network architectures and end-to-end (multi-technology domain) algorithms for dynamic resource allocation or restoration, advancing the capabilities and understanding of next-generation network technologies.