Digital signal processing for FDMA-PON: Evaluation of processing complexity of three different architectures

In this paper, we present an estimation of the digital signal processing (DSP) computational complexity for some specific optical line terminal (OLT) architectures for passive optical network (PON) applications, based on electrical frequency division multiplexing (FDM) of user data channels. The complexity and feasibility estimations is a key task in any DSP based transmission solution investigation also in relation to cost constraints, which are much tighter for PONs than for many other optical transmission applications. We derived the DSP complexity of three different architectures implementing frequency division multiple access (FDMA) and orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) transmission systems, and we discussed them with respect to the today available application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technologies.