Wavelength-tolerant optical access architectures featuring N-dimensional addressing and cascaded arrayed waveguide gratings

This paper describes two- and three-stage wavelength routed optical access networks, which offer wavelength tolerance by using coarse passband-flattened arrayed waveguide grating routers. An N-dimensional addressing strategy enables 6912 customers to be bidirectionally accessed with multi-Gb/s data using only 24 wavelengths and 1.6 nm spacing. These architectures are designed to map onto standard access network topologies, allowing elegant upgradability from legacy passive optical network (PON) infrastructures at low cost.