A Study of Options for High-Speed TDM-PON Beyond 10G

In this paper, we present and discuss options for increasing the serial bitrate of time-division-multiplexed passive optical network (TDM-PON) beyond 10 Gbps. The objective of this paper is to give an overview of the candidate technologies for increasing the serial bitrate beyond 10 Gbps and investigate which is the most suitable based on cost and technical performance. For PON-based systems, the main target is to increase the serial bitrate while decreasing the cost per bit. Challenges associated with increasing the serial bitrate beyond 10 Gbps are studied. Technologies that have the potential to enable the increase of the serial bitrate in a cost effective way are presented and discussed. Different modulation schemes are presented and the tradeoffs for each scheme are studied. An overview of experimental results on 25 and 40 Gbps TDM-PON reported in the literature is given as well.