Comcores TSN technology and 5G communication expertise to be deployed in a significant EU funded project with pan-European partners

Morten Kofoed Esbjørn v-- Jan 20 2023 -- The OCTAPUS initiative is an EU funded project, which started in September 2022 and is funded until February 2026. OCTAPUS stands for “Optical Circuit switched Time-Sensitive Network (TSN) architecture for highspeed Passive optical networks and next generation Ultra-dynamic & reconfigurable central office environments”, and the goal is to deliver an agile, low-cost and energy efficient Photonic Integrated Circuit (PIC) technology framework.

OCTAPUS was funded in responds to the rising global demand for fixed and mobile bandwidth capacity that has risen massively in the last years. This rise is due an increasing popularity of Over-The-Top (OTT) video streaming services and the rise of Machine-to-Machine communications. It is predicted that Machine-to-Machine communication will account for roughly 50% of all global connected devices by next year.

Because emerging 5G and industrial internet applications pose strict latency-oriented framework, this severely challenges the 5G infrastructure, and a new architectural change to the infrastructure is necessary. This is why OCTAPUS will re-architect the Next Generation Central Office (NGCO) ecosystem, transparently upgrading its capacity, through an innovative dynamic reconfigurable optically-switched backplane and novel photonic transceiver toolkit.

Comcores will actively contribute to the project with our expertise within ethernet TSN technology and 5G, specifically our knowledge of electrical switching and TSN features. We will provide a switching fabric and a network interface card with TSN capabilities on FPGA based platforms and a network controller. This is done to achieve dynamic TSN configuration through a centralized network controller to support load balancing, while still maintaining Quality of Service (QoS) through TSN.

For more information about the OCTAPUS project, visit the OCTAPUS website and factsheet.