Assessing Techno-Economic Gains of Next-Generation Coherent Point-to-Multipoint Data Center Interconnects

Rapid growth in AI-driven applications and 5G services is increasing traffic demand between Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Data Centers (DCs), stressing the scala- bility of conventional point-to-point (P2P) optical architectures. Regional broadband traffic has sustained approximately 14% CAGR over the last decade, driving continued expansion of optical infrastructure and increasing CAPEX and OPEX. To improve scalability and reduce infrastructure expenditure, this paper investigates an alternate solution of coherent point-to- multipoint (P2MP) pluggables enabled by Digital Sub-Carrier Multiplexing (DSCM). The evaluation is based on real ISP- DC interconnect deployments and traffic trends over 10-years traffic projection. By allowing multiple ISP interconnects to share coherent transceivers through subcarrier-level resource allocation, P2MP reduces the need for proportional expansion of transceivers and physical links. Results show that P2MP reduces total transceiver count by up to 84% and aggregation- side transceivers by up to 93% over the 10-year projection period. Interconnect density is reduced by up to 69%, while normalized CAPEX decreases by 51-64% depending on the P2MP transceiver cost. P2MP also improves energy efficiency by up to 35% in terms of power per transported Gbps. These results demonstrate that coherent P2MP architectures can substantially reduce infrastruc- ture scaling requirements in heterogeneous multi-operator ISP- DC environments.