Network traffic analysis under emerging beyond-5G scenarios for multi-band optical technology adoption

The recently created ITU-T Focus Group Network 2030 is leading network operators to identify the requirements and use cases that networks are expected to fulfill for the short, medium, and long term within the current decade. Essentially, network operators need to evolve their networks to meet strict performance requirements in several dimensions, including a large bandwidth to support foreseen beyond-5G (B5G) services, such as digital twins and volumetric video. To provide such a bandwidth requirement in a sustainable and scalable way, multi-band (MB) optical networks are expected to gradually extend legacy optical network capacity by exploiting bands beyond C + L. In this paper, we present a traffic analysis methodology to help network operators to compute expected traffic demand to be supported in their networks as a result of combining well-known mass market services with foreseen B5G service scenarios. Numerical results based on inputs and forecasts from major European network operators show that MB will be required at all network segments, including metro-aggregation, metro-core, and backbone, by the end of this decade.