Evaluation of the Impact of Coherent and Incoherent Crosstalk on the Performance of Wavelength-agnostic WDM-PON Systems

Wavelength-agnostic WDM-PON systems recently got a lot of interest as low-cost solution for metro area networking. Here, wavelength-agnostic means that the wavelength from the optical network unit to the optical line terminal is not known by the optical network unit a priori. Furthermore, calibration of a tunable laser sample wavelength is timeconsuming and therefore costly. Using uncalibrated tunable lasers leads to sweeping the wavelength over whole or part of the emission band, to find the assigned wavelength channel. This can result in inter-channel crosstalk during the start-up phase.