Area A Lab: Fundamental technologies

Multi-technology laboratory related to optics as fundamental technologies to support emerging 5G and beyond services. The lab includes access/metro data plane, data centers and control/management (software) technologies in an integrated/multi-layer view of future networks.
For the data plane level, the lab includes one of the top-10 laboratories in Fiber-to-the-Home networks, equipped with Optical/Electronic equipment for high speed DWDM systems, high frequency printed circuit board facilities for analogue and digital subsystems, bonding and optical precise alignment system, 50 GS/s real time sampling oscilloscope and 4×50 Gsps arbitrary waveform generators. Additionally, the lab includes an all-optical integration of metro + access network (with 1024 split), optical OFDM network with DML and DBA and ultra-dense-WDM PON with low-cost agnostic coherent transceivers, with ultra-fast real-time signal processing. The lab also includes signal generators and signal receivers for implementing different modulation formats in 5G Access/Metro Networks and SDN-enabled optical node prototypes (cost-effective ROADMs).
The lab includes an implementation of a Bigdata monitoring and data analytics framework, able to collect and analyse monitored data, and to trigger instances to an Orchestrator for actuations/reconfigurations of the underlying resources allocated to the services in multi-layer and multi-domain scenarios, including data centres and metro/access optical networks. This equipment allows monitoring, data analytics, control, orchestration technologies and tools to perform the proper lifecycle management of the quality (both in terms of Quality of Experience and Quality of Service) of 5G and beyond services.
The control and orchestration layers offer their capabilities to an upper Network Service Layer, composed by an NFV-MANO entity, which allows for the creation of network services, leveraging on the operations exposed by both OpenStack orchestrators (for data centres) and SDN controllers. The OpenSource MANO (OSM) platform is used to deploy network services consisting of several Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) instances interconnected by virtual links stating the desired network capacities between functions.
LINUX computation servers with Intel® Xeon® Processors and (2 x XX) cores hyperthreading, up to 11 servers with a total of 150 cores with GPU accelerators and 3 TB of storage.