Concurrent Inter-ONU Communications for Next Generation Mobile Fronthauls Based on IMDD Hybrid SSB OFDM-DFMA PONs

In PON-based mobile fronthauls, direct inter-ONU communications without passing end-user traffic to the OLT offer a promising solution for fulfilling the stringent latency and bandwidth requirements of 5G and beyond networks. In this paper, with slight modifications to the PON remote node, a concurrent inter-ONU and upstream communication technique is proposed and experimentally demonstrated in 101.6Gbit/s multipoint-to-point hybrid SSB OFDM digital filter multiple access (DFMA) IMDD PONs over 25km SSMFs. Multiple gapless inter-ONU and upstream SSB signals are aggregated by digital orthogonal filtering in each ONU transmitter. A single FFT operation is applied for demultiplex and demodulation in the OLT/ONU receivers. The results show that for both the inter-ONU and upstream transmissions, the optimum length of digital filters is 32, based on which the power penalties due to the fiber transmission and ONU channel interference are <1dB and <2dB, respectively. For the inter-ONU communications, adaptive RF spectral assignments can effectively mitigate the Rayleigh and Brillouin backscattering effects and the upstream channel fading effect, thus giving rise to >30% improvements in aggregated signal transmission capacity. In addition, detailed experimental investigations are also undertaken of the trade-off between differential ONU optical launch power dynamic range and aggregated signal transmission capacity. An approximately 1dB increase in ONU launch power dynamic range is achievable by reducing the aggregated signal transmission capacity by 5Gbit/s.