Redesigned TDM-PON System Architecture Based on Point-to-Point Ethernet Transmission and Software Processing With General-Purpose Hardware

This article proposes a novel architecture of a time division multiplexing passive optical network (TDM-PON) system with general-purpose hardware. The system operates with the point-to-point (P2P) Ethernet protocol and software processing. The architecture is redesigned from the ground up, differing from conventional PON system architectures. In recent years, researchers have attempted to softwarize a number of PON functions such as media access control (MAC) and physical functions, which run on a general-purpose central processing unit (CPU). On the other hand, these existing systems still required PON-dedicated or programmable hardware for processing the PON specific protocol. This paper proposes a TDM-PON system that requires only general-purpose hardware; a network interface card with the use of the P2P Ethernet protocol and a general-purpose server with the use of software processing. To operate the proposed system, we newly developed burst-mode operation and multipoint MAC control schemes, while taking Link Fault Signaling and CPU processing jitter into account. We quantitatively evaluated the burst-mode transmission with P2P generic Ethernet TRx as a preliminary experiment, which showed that T
_on
and T
_off
were 75 μs and less than 1 μs, respectively. Then, we measured our developed prototype system's performance for verifying the feasibility of our proposal. In specific, it achieved a 5.2 Gbps PON system consisting of an optical line terminal (OLT) server and two optical network unit (ONU) servers under the condition of a 500-ms grant cycle including a 100-ms discovery window.