Looking at the volume of publications dealing with Optical Packet (OPS) and those dealing with Elastic Optical Networking (EON) in the period from 2000 to 2016, one clearly can observe that between 2004 and 2009 there is a boom of the OPS publications and then they start to diminish. At the same time, EON publications start to take-off (around 2011) and is steadily growing. EON is an emerging technology that may be considered as a killer technology in the sense that its performance, flexibility, associated cost, ease of deployment and marketing seem to be displacing OPS from the optical networking arena. The purpose of this paper is discuss if, effectively, EON is the killer technology of OPS. So then, besides review the EON technology, the paper analyzes its actual deployment possibilities.

Peer Reviewed