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Fixed networks play an increasingly important role in supporting broadband services to homes, offices, shopping centers, business buildings, factories, smart cities, and much more. Reaching closer to end-user access points in rooms, office desks, and even factory machinery, optical fiber will realize its full potential to support a fully connected, intelligent world with high bandwidth, high reliability, low latency, and low energy consumption. With the fiber-to-everywhere vision, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) established an industry specification group (ISG) dedicated to the definition and specification of the 5th generation fixed network (F5G) in 2020. In this article, we describe the overall architecture of F5G, which consists of three interacting planes, the management, control and analysis plane, the service plane, and the underlay plane. F5G enables the quality of service (QoS) of each of the various services carried to be satisfied via end-to-end (E2E) network slicing over the customer premises network, access network, aggregation network, and core network segments. With the comprehensive service-oriented features of F5G, 14 use cases have been conceived under three main application scenarios, enhanced fixed broadband, guaranteed reliable experience, and full fiber connection. We show that F5G is capable of supporting these use cases with the requested QoS in terms of bandwidth, latency, agile service creation and bandwidth adjustment, fine granularity of bandwidth reservation, and automated E2E network orchestration and management. To further show the capabilities of the F5G architecture, we discuss the E2E network slicing in a cloud virtual reality demonstration, as well as a time-sensitive optical network for supporting cloud-based industrial applications. Finally, future perspectives of F5G and its standardization are discussed.

The fast Fourier transform, FFT, is a useful and prevalent algorithm in signal processing. It characterizes the spectral components of a signal, or is used in combination with other operations to perform more complex computations such as filtering, convolution, and correlation. Digital FFTs are limited in speed by the necessity of moving charge within logic gates. An analog temporal FFT in fiber optics has been demonstrated with highest data bandwidth. However, the implementation with discrete fiber optic FFT components is bulky. Here, we present and analyze a design of an optical FFT in Silicon photonics and evaluate its performance with respect to variations in phase and amplitude. We discuss the impact of the deployed devices on the FFTs transfer function quality as defined by the transmission output power as a function of frequency, detuning phase, optical delay, and loss.

Optical communication systems carry the bulk of all data traffic worldwide. This book introduces multi-Terabit/s transmission systems and three key technologies for next generation networks. A software-defined multi-format transmitter, an optical comb source and an optical processing scheme for the fast Fourier transform for Tbit/s signals. Three world records demonstrate the potential: The first single laser 10 Tbit/s and 26 Tbit/s OFDM and the first 32.5 Tbit/s Nyquist WDM experiments.