Metropolitan Optical Networks: A Survey on New Architectures and Future Trends

Abstract: Metropolitan optical networks are undergoing major transformations to continue being able to provide services that meet the requirements of the applications of the future. The arrival of the $5G$ will expand the possibilities for offering IoT applications, autonomous vehicles, and smart cities services while imposing strong pressure on the physical infrastructure currently implemented, as well as on static traffic engineering techniques that do not respond in an agile way to the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of the upcoming traffic patterns. In order to guarantee the strictest quality of service and quality of experience requirements for users, as well as meeting the providers' objectives of maintaining an acceptable trade-off between cost and performance, new architectures for metropolitan optical networks have been proposed in the literature, with a growing interest starting from $2017$. However, due to the proliferation of a dozen of new architectures in recent years, many questions need to be investigated regarding the planning, implementation, and management of these architectures, before they could be considered for practical application. This work presents a comprehensive survey of the new proposed architectures for metropolitan optical networks. Firstly, the main data transmission systems, equipment involved, and the structural organization of the new metro ecosystems are discussed. The already established and the novel architectures are presented, highlighting its characteristics and application, and comparative analysis among these architectures is carried out identifying the future technological trends. Finally, outstanding research questions are drawn to help direct future research on the field.