SNS-SEASON
Self-managed sustainable high-capacity optical networks
Self-managed sustainable high-capacity optical networks: multi-band and space-division-multiplexing transport with autonomous, AI-driven control. NSLab took part as subcontractor of WEST Aquila.
The project
SEASON – SElf-mAnaged Sustainable high-capacity Optical Networks is a Horizon Europe project funded by the Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS JU, call HORIZON-JU-SNS-2022). Its goal is to design and validate a sustainable transport network able to support beyond-5G and emerging services. The SEASON infrastructure relies on the joint use of multi-band (MB) and space division multiplexing (SDM) transmission across access, aggregation and metro/long-haul segments, integrating packet/optical and computing layers to scale capacity cost-effectively with energy efficiency as a primary objective: power-efficient DSP, MB-over-SDM optical switching, point-to-multipoint coherent transceivers and converged packet-optical solutions. On the control side, SEASON targets autonomous optical networks: integrated control of RAN, access and transport, streaming telemetry, real-time measurements and AI/ML-aided service orchestration based on distributed agents and closed control loops.
Our role
Within SEASON, the University of L'Aquila acted as subcontractor of the project partner WEST Aquila S.r.l. (February – December 2025) with a research programme on next-generation optical fibres supporting O-RAN-controlled mobile networks and the edge deployment of extended-reality services. The tasks covered the definition of use cases, requirements and reference architecture, the techno-economic analysis, the integration of the SDM-PON with the control-plane functions, the distributed software system for streaming monitoring and telemetry, AI/ML-based service orchestration and self-management, and the provision of the University's laboratory facilities for experiments.
The core of the activity was Demo 2, "Field trial of spatial PON and metro convergence with O-RAN for AR/VR services with edge offload", run on the field-deployed infrastructure in L'Aquila: the multi-core-fibre ring of the INCIPICT/FIBERS living testbed, an O-RAN radio access network and an edge/orchestration data centre. The demo validated end-to-end orchestration across spatial PON (dynamic activation of MCF lanes), metro IPoWDM and O-RAN (RIC-triggered RU/DU scaling) through a Network Service Orchestrator with telemetry-driven closed-loop adaptation, showing traffic-driven resource scaling with power savings of about 8% under traffic-aware orchestration and up to about 19% with full RU shutdown, and independent PON lanes over two MCF cores with no inter-core interference. An immersive "virtual museum" AR/VR service (Unity/OpenXR on Meta Quest 3, backend on a k3s edge cluster) was the demonstrated application. Results are reported in deliverable D5.3 and in A. Marotta et al., End-to-End Orchestration across MCF Infrastructure: Field Trial of Spatial PON and Metro Convergence with O-RAN for AR/VR Services with Edge Offload, OFC 2026.
Facts
- Programme: Horizon Europe, SNS JU Research and Innovation Action, grant agreement no. 101096120.
- Duration: 1 January 2023 – 31 December 2025 (36 months).
- Coordinator: CNIT. Partners include CTTC, Adtran Networks, Telefónica, Fraunhofer HHI, TIM, UPC, Infinera, WEST Aquila, Accelleran, WINGS ICT Solutions, Ericsson.
- Budget: about € 6.4 M.
- NSLab contact: Andrea Marotta.
- Website: season-project.eu
Publications (0)
No publications linked to this project yet.