Broadband fiber access: A fiber-to-the-customer access architecture

The proliferation of high-bandwidth applications such as high-speed Internet access and telecommuting has created among network providers a growing interest in upgrading their networks to deliver broadband services to homes and small businesses. This paper describes broadband fiber access (BFA), a fiber-to-the-customer access architecture based on Lucent Technologies' broadband AnyMedia™ interface platform (AIP). The BFA architecture provides asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) connection to customer premises equipment (CPE) and supports full quality-of-service (QoS) and traffic management functions defined by the ATM Forum. The BFA line card, or application pack (AP), is designed to support the concentration of traffic from CPE at the OC-3c/STM-1 rate (155.52 Mb/s). It supports the use of single-fiber drop to CPE using bidirectional coarse wavelength division multiplexing (CWDM). A hardware-based flow-control mechanism, which is applied to low-priority traffic originated from the CPE, allows for fast response to congestion at the feeder multiplexer. This fast response to congestion allows fair and efficient utilization of the feeder bandwidth.