Effective user accommodation will be more and more important in passive optical networks (PONs) in the next decade since the number of subscribers has been leveling off as well and it is becoming more difficult for network operators to keep sufficient numbers of maintenance workers. Drastically reducing the number of small-scale communication buildings while keeping the number of accommodated users is one of the most attractive solutions to meet this situation. To achieve this, we propose two types of long-reach repeater-free upstream transmission configurations for PON systems; (i) one utilizes a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) as a pre-amplifier and (ii) the other utilizes distributed Raman amplification (DRA) in addition to the SOA. Our simulations assuming 10G-EPON specifications and transmission experiments on a 10G-EPON prototype confirm that configuration (i) can add a 17km trunk fiber to a normal PON system with 10km access reach and 1 : 64 split (total 27km reach), while configuration (ii) can further expand the trunk fiber distance to 37km (total 47km reach). Network operators can select these configurations depending on their service areas.

We present an 82.5GS/s over-sampling based burst-mode clock and data recovery (BM-CDR) IC chip-set comprising an 82.5GS/s over-sampling IC using 8×10.3GHz multi-phase clocks and a dual-rate data selector logic IC to realize the 10.3Gb/s and 1.25Gb/s dual-rate burst-mode fast-lock operation required for 10-Gigabit based fiber-to-the-x (FTTx) services supported by 10-Gigabit Ethernet passive optical network (10G-EPON) systems. As the key issue for designing the proposed 82.5GS/s BM-CDR, a fresh study of the optimum number of multi-phase clocks, which is equivalent to the sampling resolution, is undertaken, and details of the 10.3Gb/s cum 1.25/Gb/s dual-rate optimum phase data selection logic based on a blind phase decision algorithm, which can realize a full single-platform dual-rate BM-CDR, ate also presented. By using the power of the proposed 82.5GS/s over-sampling BM-CDR in cooperation with our dual-rate burst-mode optical receiver, we further demonstrated that a short dual-rate and burst-mode preamble of 256ns supporting receiver settling and CDR recovery times was successfully achieved, while obtaining high receiver sensitivities of -31.6dBm at 10.3Gb/s and -34.6dBm at 1.25Gb/s and a high pulse-width distortion tolerance of +/-0.53UI, which are superior to the 10G-EPON standard.

To drastically increase the splitting ratio of extended-reach (40km span) time- and wavelength-division multiplexed passive optical networks (WDM/TDM-PONs), we modify the gain control scheme of our automatic gain controlled semiconductor optical amplifiers (AGC-SOAs) that were developed to support upstream transmission in long-reach systems. While the original AGC-SOAs are located outside the central office (CO) as repeaters, the new AGC-SOAs are located inside the CO and connected to each branch of an optical splitter in the CO. This arrangement has the potential to greatly reduce the costs of CO-sited equipment as they are shared by many more users if the new gain control scheme works properly even when the input optical powers are low. We develop a prototype and experimentally confirm its effectiveness in increasing the splitting ratio of extended-reach systems to 512.

In this invited paper, software defined network (SDN)-based approaches for future cost-effective optical mobile backhaul (MBH) networks are discussed, focusing on key principles, throughput optimization and dynamic service provisioning as its use cases. We propose a novel physical-layer aware throughput optimization algorithm that confirms > 100Mb/s end-to-end per-cell throughputs with ≥2.5Gb/s optical links deployed at legacy cell sites. We also demonstrate the first optical line terminal (OLT)-side optical Nyquist filtering of legacy 10G on-off-keying (OOK) signals, enabling dynamic >10Gb/s Orthogonal Frequency Domain Multiple Access (OFDMA) λ-overlays for MBH over passive optical network (PON) with 40-km transmission distances and 1:128 splitting ratios, without any ONU-side equipment upgrades. The software defined flexible optical access network architecture described in this paper is thus highly promising for future MBH networks.

In this paper, we demonstrate a 10.66 Gb/s bidirectional TDM over long-reach WDM hybrid PON supported by distributed Raman amplification, and the power budget margin is measured to be 15 dB for downstream transmission and 12 dB for upstream transmission, with dual Raman pump power of 300 mW.

Fiber access network architectures such as active optical networks (AONs) and passive optical networks (PONs) have been developed to support the growing bandwidth demand. Whereas particularly Swedish operators prefer AON, this may not be the case for operators in other countries. The choice depends on a combination of technical requirements, practical constraints, business models, and cost. Due to the increasing importance of reliable access to the network services, connection availability is becoming one of the most crucial issues for access networks, which should be reflected in the network owner's architecture decision. In many cases protection against failures is realized by adding backup resources. However, there is a trade off between the cost of protection and the level of service reliability since improving reliability performance by duplication of network resources (and capital expenditures CAPEX) may be too expensive. In this paper we present the evolution of fiber access networks and compare reliability performance in relation to investment and management cost for some representative cases. We consider both standard and novel architectures for deployment in both sparsely and densely populated areas. While some recent works focused on PON protection schemes with reduced CAPEX the current and future effort should be put on minimizing the operational expenditures (OPEX) during the access network lifetime.

We propose and demonstrate a scheme enhancing the performance of optical access networks with Manchester coded downstream and re-modulated NRZ coded upstream. It is achieved by threshold level control of a limiting amplifier at a receiver, and the minimum sensitivity of upstream is significantly improved for the re-modulation scheme with 5 Gb/s Manchester coded downstream and 2.488 Gb/s NRZ upstream data rates.

In this paper, we propose a PON-based access network based on conventional TDM-PON architecture for the smooth, economical and effective transition to the future optical access network. We also propose a dynamic MAC protocol for wavelength channel and bandwidth allocation in the TDM-PON subscriber networks, which can provide enhanced network scalability and flexibility, and greater adaptability to the increasing number of subscribers in TDM-PON. In the proposed dynamic MAC protocol, several key functions are manifested, such as multiple wavelength channel utilization and dynamic allocation of multiple time-slots to a user depending on SLA between OLT and ONUs to meet QoS requirements. A dedicated control channel is used for delivering the request and status information between OLT and ONUs. We evaluate the performances of the proposed MAC protocol thru a statistical queuing analysis and numerical simulations. In addition, through simulations using various traffic models we verify the superior performance of the proposed approach by comparing it with conventional TDM-PONs.