Sustainable 6G Optical Any-Haul with Coherent Pluggables in Converged Metro-Access

Abstract

Future 6G networks will require transport solutions capable of meeting the stringent latency and bandwidth demands of any-haul traffic. This paper investigates the potential of converged metro-access networks offered as a service, within an Optical Network as-a-Service (ONaaS) framework, to address these requirements. Leveraging a physical-layer abstraction of a digital subcarrier multiplexing (DSCM)-based transceiver combined with statistical path analysis, we evaluate three key aspects: (i) route feasibility under split 7.2 latency and BER constraints for different Distributed Units (DUs) placement strategies; (ii) the resource footprint of Point-to-Point (P2P) versus Point-to-multipoint (P2MP) optical aggregation, accounting for transceivers, routers, and port occupancy at DU sites; and (iii) power consumption at both DU and network scale across varying spectral loads. Results show that increasing DU density significantly reduces the number of non-feasible routes, while P2MP architectures lower DU-site transceiver, router, and power requirements compared to P2P. These findings provide quantitative and qualitative gains for a scalable and energyefficient any-haul design in 6G converged metro-access networks enabled by ONaaS.