| Considering the challenges faced by the current Central Offices, this paper presents a novel architecture and related technological aspects of the Next Generation Central Offices (NGCOs), as envisioned within the OCTAPUS research project, towards the flexible support of the emerging capacity and latency demanding services. First, the main functional blocks of the OCTAPUS NGCO Data and Control planes are presented, with emphasis on the dynamicity of the optical paths within the NGCO and its reconfiguration capabilities. Then, focusing on the Control plane, we describe in detail its hierarchical structure, the role of the associated entities and the interactions among them. An example of network provisioning to support multiple concurrent next-generation services of realistic use cases in a real urban area is used to stress the need for NGCOs to adapt to different service requirements and temporal fluctuations in traffic demands, while catering for time-sensitive services with stringent delay requirements. |
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