Evolutionary passive optical ring architectures for user-empowered MANs

The continuously increasing bandwidth and QoS demand, together with the increased availability of dark fiber infrastructures that some competitive carriers are starting to sell or long-term lease at reasonable prices, is driving many organizations to behave as local network operators to deploy and manage their own independent optical high-speed metro access networks, rather than relying on the service-based offerings from traditional carriers. In this scenario passive optical network (PON) technology is emerging as the best solution for cost-effective delivery of high bandwidth data directly to the customers. In this paper we propose a WDM-based multi-ring PON architecture which may be in our opinion, a suitable model for small-to-medium scale customer-empowered metro networks.