Benefits of dynamic operation across the confluent mesh network

Determine whether dynamic operation across the entire radio-optical confluent mesh network can realize latency and energy-efficiency benefits.

Background

The paper reviews radio-optical confluence architectures that combine fiber, free-space optical, and radio links in edge and metro mesh networks, including transport of analog radio-over-fiber and digital coherent optical signals. Its network analysis shows that adding a small number of bypass links can reduce hop counts, but it does not evaluate dynamic operation across the complete mesh. The unresolved problem is to establish whether network-wide dynamic operation can produce measurable latency and energy-efficiency improvements.