Enabling optical and wireless broadband access technologies

The bandwidth demand of the telecommunication network users are increasing from day to day. Bandwidth demand in our networks will continue to grow rapidly due to the increasing number of technology-intelligent users. Four main expectations from the users are high mobility, large data bandwidth, high quality of service (QoS), and ubiquitous coverage. The emerging optical and wireless access technologies are expected to provide these demands. Optical and wireless access networks have emerged to address two issues: channel capacity sharing fairly to the customers, and adequate capacity assignment according to service requirements. In this paper, the enabling optical and wireless broadband access technologies are presented and compared. The architectures, advantages, disadvantages, and main parameters of these access networks are discussed and reported. The hybrid wireless-optical broadband access technology is presented, which has many advantages to become the next-generation broadband access network. The concept and architecture of the hybrid wireless/optical broadband access technology are reviewed. The hybrid system developed at the Lightwave Communication Research Group (LCRG) is presented as a case study. It comprises of passive optical network in the trunk and a wireless-optical access network. The passive optical network (PON) supports a maximum data rate of 100 Gbps by using the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technique in the optical access network. In the wireless access network, WiMAX IEEE 802.16m provides data rate of 1 Gbps for fixed users and 100 Mbps for mobile users.