The emerging high bandwidth and on-demand user applications require improvements in capacity, configurability and resiliency in next generation optical access networks to incrementally expand on the basis of customers requirements. New architectures and technologies are needed to achieve also scalability and active traffic adaptation. In this article an all-optical merger of access and metro networks is proposed with the use of Reconfigurable Optical Add Drop Multiplexers (ROADMs) and Optical Burst Switching Multiplexers (OBSMs), which are new network elements multiplexing at optical burst level. The resulting novel network architectures, named the OBSWAMA network, are evaluated as an innovative solution to reach a flexible, dynamic and efficient solution for the aforementioned next generation optical access networks.

Peer Reviewed