Contents I. Introduction
Driven by the global IP traffic increase and the even more rapid growth of busy hour Internet traffic, future optical networks, and particularly the metropolitan area network (MAN) segment, should support ultra-high capacity and dynamicity, while lowering both capital and operational expenditures (CAPEX/OPEX). In fact, it is forecasted that Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) will carry 72% of Internet traffic by 2022 (56% in 2017) and 33% of service provider network capacity will be within the metro network by the same year (27% in 2017) [1]. Thus, use cases to be considered and suitably addressed to meet the MAN evolutionary scenario requirements are i) cost-effective ultra-broadband transport and dynamic capacity adaptation, providing a pay-as-you-grow scheme, ii) efficient interconnection of distributed computation sites (e.g. CDN) within the MAN and iii) the ability of supporting massive events.
