Scaling Edge Computing through S-BVT and Pb/s Switching Devices in Large Dense Urban Metro Networks

Dense metropolitan areas are responsible for the majority of the traffic growth in telecom operators. The focus of the EU H2020 PASSION project is to develop new photonic technologies for supporting agile metro networks and enabling capacities of Tb/ s per channel to deal with such traffic increment, with a particular focus on two components (1) the Sliceable Bandwidth Variable Transceivers (S-BVT) and (2) Pb/s optical switches. This paper analyses two strategies from the perspective of computation resource consumption: overflow over a paired same-level DC and overflow over a centralized site. We present a methodology to compare both schemes and prove that a proper distribution of computing resources in the centralized overflow together with S-BVT highspeed transmission can outperform the costs of a distributed strategy, requiring fewer processors and much smaller DCs.