The Future of Passive Optical Networks

Future system generations of passive optical networks will be applicable to new use-cases like smart city infrastructures including mobile x-hauling and critical network segments for e.g. vehicle-to-infrastructure communications and industrial IoT. These new applications for PON systems are coming with changes on the requirements compared to traditional PON system designs. Higher throughput, lower latency, increased availability of network and reliability of applications are demanded depending on the services. In this paper, an outlook to the evolution of future PON systems will be given using the example of the smart city application. PON system generation status and developments as well as the action at the level of standardization are highlighted.