No abstract

We have demonstrated a 2.5 Gb/s, 60 km long-reach WDM-TDM PON using a bidirectional SOARaman hybrid amplifier. The proposed hybrid PON has the potential to address as many as 1024 subscribers IntroductionThe interest in long-reach WDM-TDM hybrid PON has increased due in part to a proposal for consolidating local exchanges (or central offices) to reduce real estate costs, capital expenditures, and operating expenses (including powering and maintenance costs) [1]. Compared with using O-E-O repeaters, an optical amplifier may be a more simple and cost-effective approach for extending the reach of WDM-TDM hybrid PONs. One of the big technical challenges in employing optical amplifiers in TDM-PONs is amplification of burst-mode upstream signals without data packet loss. A recent semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) demonstration showed good performance amplifying burst-mode WDM upstream signals, without significant signal distortion [2].A flexible hybrid SOA-Raman amplifier (SRHA) with over 90 nm gain bandwidth has previously been investigated for fiber-to-the-home and metro network applications [3,4,5]. Based on this work, a new bi-directional SRHA design, for which costly components are shared, is used to demonstrate a 2.488-Gb/s WDM-TDM hybrid PON. These system results feature two extended (60 km) TDM-PONs on a common infrastructure (serving 128 subscribers) and are extensible to 1024 subscribers.