A Survey of Reconfigurable Optical Networks

Reconfigurable optical networks have emerged as a promising technology to efficiently serve the fast-growing traffic produced by the digital society. This paper provides a survey of the field. We first review enabling optical hardware technologies in general and then consider technologies that are specific to data center networks and wide-area networks in more detail. We further provide an overview of the cost models used in the literature as well as the algorithmic problems introduced by these technologies, their first solutions, and discuss systems and implementation aspects. We conclude with a discussion of open challenges.