The super-PON concept and its technical challenges

This paper describes the architecture and the technical challenges for the design of a large-split and long-range Passive Optical Network (PON) intended for Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH) deployment. The system, called Super-PON, can support a splitting factor of 1024 (or more but with a more complex and hence costly implementation) and a range of 100 km. The overall network capacity is 2.5 Gbps TDM downstream and 300 Mbps ATM-based TDMA upstream. As compared with already designed PON systems, the proposed Super-PON requires the introduction of optical amplifiers along the fiber paths. The presence of these optical amplifiers brings new technical challenges especially for burst mode amplification in the upstream direction of transmission. Analysis and potential solutions to solve these problems while allowing further capacity upgrades using WDM/VDMA techniques are described in this paper along with a discussion of network survivability issues.