In the last decade we assisted to a continuous growth of transport and metro networks, presently the bottleneck is in the processing of huge amount of data constituted by growing number of users, the capacity content that is exchanged and the convergence of Telecom (TLC) and Datacom. Thus the optical TLC is constantly growing with the promise to support increasing bandwidth requirements, quality of service (QoS), flexibility, low power consumption and ultimately low cost required for a sustainable evolution of information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure. According to major analyst forecasts, the growth of Metro Networks is one of the drives of this evolution. Looking at the state of the art, the current transmission devices for the Metro Network are evolving from the traditional approach by proposing enhanced modulation schemes or, as alternative, coherent transmission solution, which today are used mainly for Long Haul (LH) transmission and are characterized by high cost and high power consumption. Nonetheless, the expected performance enhancement such as throughput is only increased by a maximum of 4 folds, which is not adequate to support 5G and beyond network requirements.

In line with ICT-30 call, the passion projects aims to meet the above mentioned requirements by providing innovative solutions covering, technology, architectural vision and network management (NM) tool aspects. PASSION introduces new photonic technologies and devices for supporting agile metro networks, capable of enabling target capacities of Tb/s per channel, 100 Tb/s per link and Pb/s per node over increased transport distances in the range of few hundreds of kms. The modularity and programmability (via Software defined networks: SDN) of the system and subsystem components is used to achieve the level flexibility demanded by agile traffic demand, channel bandwidth/path/state/energy requirements of the metro network. Array of modules of the sliceable bandwidth variable transmitters (S-BVTx) based on high-speed, low-energy consumption, high-reliability and low-cost InP-based VCSELs, will be used to emit in the C-band. Development of energy-efficient and small-footprint switching technologies for a node featuring functional aggregation/disaggregation, together with switching in the space and wavelength domain will be used to handle up to 1-Pb/s capacity. Coherent receiver technology will be leveraged to realize multi-channel, polarization diverse and polarization independent receiver array. A low-cost, non-hermitic technology will be leveraged to realize multi-channel, polarization diverse and polarization independent coherent receiver array. Unlike the current technology, we aim to use a single fiber as an input to the receiver leading to a simplified packaging.