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Emerging Optical Broadband Access Networks from TDM PON to

OFDM PON
Redhwan Q. Shaddad1, 2 , Abu Bakar Mohammad1 , Sevia M. Idrus1 ,
Abdulaziz M. Al-hetar2 , and Nasir A. Al-geelani3
1

Photonic Technology Center, InfoComm Research Alliance, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Malaysia
2
Communication and Computer Engineering Department
Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, Taiz University, Yemen
3
Institute of High Voltage and High Current, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Malaysia

Abstract The bandwidth requirements of the telecommunication network users increased

rapidly during the last decades. The emerging optical access technologies must provide the bandwidth demand for each user. The passive optical access networks (PONs) support a maximum
data rate of 100 Gbps by using the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technique
in the optical access network. In this paper, the enabling optical broadband access networks with
many techniques are presented and compared. The architectures, advantages, disadvantages, and
main parameters of these access networks are discussed and reported. A combination of different techniques in a hybrid PON network introduces a cost-effective, reliable and efficient access
network. The hybrid optical broadband access technologies are presented which have many advantages to become next-generation broadband access networks. The concept and architecture
of the hybrid optical broadband access networks are discussed.
1. INTRODUCTION

The high-speed broadband penetration and ongoing growth of the Internet traffic among customers
have been placing a huge bandwidth demand on the telecommunication network. Next generation
access networks are projected to support high data rate, broadband multiple services, scalable
bandwidth, and flexible communications for manifold end-users. Optical broadband access networks
have emerged to address two issues: (1) channel capacity sharing fairly to the customers, and (2)
adequate capacity assignment according to service requirements.
The dominant broadband access network that is emerging from todays research and development activities is a point-to-multipoint (P2MP) optical network known as passive optical network
(PON). In PON, the central office (CO) is connected to users by using one wavelength channel
in the downstream direction [from optical line terminal (OLT) at CO to optical network units
(ONUs)] and another wavelength channel in the upstream direction [from ONUs to OLT] [1]. The
time division multiplexing technique is used in this PON, so it is called usually TDM PON. The
existing PON architectures provide much higher bandwidth for data application but it has limited
availability to end-users. 32 ONUs can be connected to one OLT over a single fiber. The fiber
range is limited to 20 km [2].
The per-user cost of TDM PONs can be low as the bandwidth is shared among all the end
users, so the wavelength division multiplexed PON (WDM PON) is used to solve this problem. A
WDM-PON solution provides excellent scalability because it can support multiple wavelengths over
the same fiber infrastructure, it is inherently transparent to the channel bit rate, depending on its
architecture, and it may not suffer power-splitting losses [3]. WDM PON creates a point-to-point
(P2P) link between the OLT and each ONU, so each ONU can operate at a rate up to the full
bit rate of a wavelength channel. Moreover, different wavelengths may be operated at different bit
rates, if necessary; hence, different types of services may be supported over the same network [1].
A code-division multiple-access (CDMA) PON is proposed as an optical access network system
to satisfy the subscribers increasing data traffic and get low cost [4]. To avoid the dispersion effects
on the optical signal in the TDM PON and WDM PON, the future PONs are designed based on
subcarrier multiplexing (SCM) and the optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)
techniques which are called SCM PONs and OFDM PONs respectively. These two types of PONs
provide bandwidth efficient optical access networks [5]. The different PONs can be hybrid and
integrated to get powerful PONs demand on the requirements as discussed later in this paper.

Progress In Electromagnetics Research Symposium Proceedings, KL, MALAYSIA, March 2730, 2012 103

ONU1

ONU2

Optical Fiber
OLT

ONU3
RN

d
u

OLT: Optical Line Terminal

RN: Remote Node
ONU: Optimal Network Unit
N: Number of ONUs
u : Upstream wavelength
d : Downstream wavelength

ONU4

ONUN

Figure 1: Passive optical network.

2. OPTICAL BROADBAND ACCESS TECHNOLOGIES

PONs offer a promising optical access solution for significantly enhancing the bandwidth of access
networks. A PON basically consists of an OLT at the central office which transmits traffic received
from the access network to the Internet and vice versa, an remote node (RN) which contains
passive splitters/couplers for demultiplexing the downstream traffic received from the OLT and
multiplexing the upstream traffic to the OLT, and multiple ONUs close to users premises which
receive the downstream traffic from the RN and generate the upstream traffic to the RN. Figure 2
illustrates the architecture of a passive optical network.
There are five main schemes of PON which can be summarized as using TDM, WDM, CDM,
SCM, and OFDM. The only difference in the outside plant (OSP) between these five approaches
is at the RN location. In TDM PONs, CDMA PONs, OFDM PONs and SCM PONs, passive
power splitters are used to distribute the optical signal to manifold ONUs. The OLT and ONUs
process the data according to the used technique. Passive wavelength splitters, such as an arrayedWavegauide-grating (AWG) router, is used to distribute the bandwidth among ONUs according to
the assigned wavelengths in WDM PON [6].
3. TDM PON

In the TDM PON, the CO dedicates time slot to the multiple subscriber (ONU) connected to the
PON. Each ONU can then use the full upstream bandwidth of the optical link for the duration of
its assigned time slot. Since the TDM PON can typically service N = 32 or more subscribers, the
average dedicated bandwidth to each ONU is usually only a few percent of the channel capacity.
To connect the multiple ONUs to a single-feeder fiber, a passive optical power splitter (PS) is
used at the RN. This PS couples 1/N of the power from each subscriber into the feeder fiber for
transmission back to the OLT at the CO [6].
There are three standardized versions of the TDM-PON: Ethernet PON (EPON), broadband
PON (BPON), and Gigabit PON (GPON). They all use one wavelength for downstream transmission (d ) and another wavelength for upstream transmission (d ) as illustrated in Figure 1. One
important distinction between the three types of TDM-PON is operational speed. BPON is relatively low speed with 155 Mbps upstream/622 Mbps downstream operation. The EPON supports
1.0 Gbps symmetrical operation. The GPON promises 2.5/1.25 Gbps asymmetrical operation.
4. WDM PON

The straightforward approach to build a WDM PON is to employ separate wavelength channels
from the OLT to the ONUs in the downstream direction which called downlink wavelengths (d1 ,
d2 , . . ., dN ). In upstream direction, the uplink wavelengths (u1 , u2 , . . ., uN ) pass from the
ONUs to the OLT. Figure 2 shows generic network architecture of WDM PON. AWG router is
used at the distribution node to separate and combine the downstream and upstream wavelengths
respectively. This approach creates a P2P link between the OLT and each ONU. Since the optical

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ONU11

u1, u2, ..., uN

Optical Fiber
d1-dN
OLT
dN
uN

Receiver
Transmitter

OLT: Optical Line Terminal

AWG Router: Arrayed Waveguide Grating Route
ONU: Optimal Network Unit
N: Number of downstream wavelengths
DEMUX: Optical demultiplexer

Figure 2: Typical WDM-PON access network.

ONU12

u1

u1-uN

d2

ONU1M

u2
ONUN1
dN

OLT: Optical Line Terminal

AWG Router: Arrayed Waveguide Grating Route uN
PS/C: Passive Power Splitter and Combiner
ONU: Optimal Network Unit
N: Number of wavelengths
M: Number of ONUs which use specified wavelength

PS/C

Optical Fiber
d1, d2, ..., dN

Receiver
Transmitter

AWG Router

u1

DEMUX

Receiver Array

Circulator
WDM Receiver

d1

AWG Router
1XN

OLT
WDM
Modulated
Source

d1

PS/C

ONUs

ONUN2

ONUNM

Figure 3: Network architecture of the hybrid

TDM/WDM PON.

power is split for a smaller number of users, WDM PONs are less subject to optical power budget
constraints and can support long reach to the ONUs [7].
An efficient bi-directional broadband optical networks using dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) technology is proposed [8]. The proposed DWDM PON scheme is implemented
using optical carrier suppression and separation (OCSS) technology to generate a down/uplink
wavelength pair from a single laser source at the central office. This method enables the co-location
of both upstream and downstream DWDM transmitters in the central office.
5. CDMA PON

Even though TDM PON has efficient bandwidth utilization, it has limitations in its increased
transmission speed, difficulty in burst synchronization, low security, dynamic bandwidth allocation
(DBA) requirement and inaccurate ranging. WDM PON becomes more favorable as the required
bandwidth increases, but cost and wavelength tuning problems at remote units prevent its commercialization. In addition, the effect of statistical multiplexing is insignificant in multimedia
communications environments. A CDMA PON, where each subscribers channel is given its own
code for spreading and dispreading, is a good alternative in view of cost and simplicity. Furthermore, the optical beat noise problem, which often arises in a system using several laser diodes
(LDs) as in optical subcarrier multiplexing (SCM), does not have much effect on the CDMA PON
system [4].
The CDMA PON has same architecture of the TDM PON. Downlink channels, from OLT
to ONUs, are spectrum spread, combined, and then provided to an LD modulation part. After
transmission, the signal is split at a splitter and spread at a receiver side. Since only one LD is
used for the downlink, no optical beat noise exists. However, in the uplink case, each ONU uses its
own LD whose wavelength is not unique unlike in the WDM PON [4]. Since CDMA PON uses an
optical-power splitter at the RN, it suffers the same power-insertion-loss penalty as for the TDM
PON case.
6. SCM PON

In SCM PON, one dedicated electrical subcarrier for each ONU is used, and it allows multiple
users to share the same optical channel and its corresponding components. As compared to the
conventional high-speed TDM systems, the SCM is less sensitive to fiber dispersion because the
dispersion penalty is determined by the width of the baseband of each individual signal channel. As
compared to the conventional WDM systems, it has been better optical spectral efficiency because
much narrower channel spacing is allowed. Since it has a high bandwidth efficiency, it suffers the
optical beat interference (OBI) especially when the number of nodes is large [9].
7. OFDM PON

Using OFDM format for PON is a subject of great interest for recent research works. OFDM signal
has high spectral efficiency, high tolerance to the fiber chromatic dispersion and the high flexibility
on both multiple services provisioning and dynamic bandwidth allocation. OFDM supports an

Progress In Electromagnetics Research Symposium Proceedings, KL, MALAYSIA, March 2730, 2012 105

effective solution to eliminate intersymbol interference (ISI) caused by dispersive channels [10].
The main disadvantages of OFDM are its high peak to average power ratio and its sensitivity to
phase noise and frequency offset. These impairments are discussed and solved in [10].
There are two strategies for transmitting the optical OFDM signal: (1) Optical coherent detection OFDM (CO-OFDM) which is implemented by optical I-Q modulation in conjunction with
coherent detection. CO-OFDM shows higher performance in terms of bandwidth efficiency and
receiver sensitivity. By means of the choice of the modulation level, bandwidth efficiency and sensitivity can be balanced. (2) Optical direct detection OFDM (DD-OFDM): this method restricts
to a real OFDM signal transmitted with intensity modulation and direct detection. DD-OFDM
provides the advantages OFDM, like robustness toward fiber dispersion [10].
OFDM PON has same architecture of the conventional PON and uses one wavelength for downlink (d ) and another one for uplink (u ). In both the downlink and uplink traffics, the OFDM
PON system divides the total OFDM bandwidth in N sub-bands, each containing a quantity of
subcarriers required by each user. OFDM PONs can support huge data rates of 53 Gbps [5] and
100 Gbps [4].
8. HYBRID PONS

It is also possible to use mixed or hybrid approaches. The combination of TDM and WDM in a
hybrid PON network (as shown in Figure 3) could be the most cost effective way of introducing
TDM/WDM PON into the access network.
TDM-PONs limit each subscriber to a certain time interval and hence bandwidth per subscriber
is reduced. Furthermore, the security of the transmission is not guaranteed since each subscriber
on the TDM PON receives all the information sent to the other subscribers on the network. In
contrast, DWDM PONs can solve the problems encountered in TDM PONs by allocating a specified
wavelength to each subscriber. This provides a separate, secure P2P, and high data-rate channel
between each subscriber and the CO. In addition to its efficient use of wavelengths, the WDM PON
also has advantages in its use of optical-transmission power. The network management is much
simpler than a TDM PON, and all future services can be delivered over a single network platform.
In the case where allocating a single wavelength to each subscriber is not economical or impractical,
DWDM can still be introduced in a hybrid TDM/DWDM PON as mentioned before.
If the user bandwidth demands are low or a small number of users can still share a single
wavelength in the WDM PON, then a passive optical splitter following the wavelength division
multiplexer is used to broadcast the downstream traffic and combine the upstream traffic as shown
in Figure 3 [1]. In this case, multiple wavelengths separate a single PON into multiple logical
TDM PONs: each PON runs on different wavelength, and a smaller number of users shares the
bandwidth of a TDM PON.
To overcome relatively expensive cost of the WDM components in the WDM PON, the hybrid
SCM/WDM PON is proposed [12]. In this proposed scheme, downstream signal modulated directly
using a distributed-feedback laser diode (DFB-LD). In upstream transmission, the downstream
signal is re-modulated using reflective semiconductor optical amplifiers (RSOA) with the SCM
technique. No additional high cost devices are required such as external modulator and EDFA. To
allow for higher data rates and higher number of users in the optical access network, the hybrid
OCDMA/WDM PON is proposed [4]. It is a promising technology to realize soft capacity access
network and high utilization of the bandwidth, as the subscribers of WDM PON can be multiplied.
The proposed system supports 16,00032,000 available subscribers.
A novel lightwave centralized hybrid bidirectional access network for integration of WDM/OFDM
PON with radio-over-fiber (ROF) systems is proposed in [13] by employing multi-wavelength generation and the carrier-reuse technique. The proposed PON reduces Rayleigh backscattering (RB)
in the bidirectional transmission. In this system, both 11.29 Gbps OFDM-16QAM downlink and
5.65 Gbps OFDM quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) uplink are investigated along 25 km single
mode fiber (SMF).
9. CONCLUSION

This article has outlined the current and future generations of the optical broadband access technologies. The emerging optical broadband access technologies are reviewed and compared. While
there are considerable differences between these technologies, there are also remarkable similarities.
For broadband access services, there is strong competition among several technologies. Among the

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various emerging optical access technologies, the OFDM-based technologies are the most promising technologies because they provide the highest transmission capacity, the efficient bandwidth
accesses, and the robust dispersion tolerance in the optical wireless links.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT

We greatly appreciate Universiti Teknologi Malaysia and Photonic Technology Center for providing
the facilities which enable this work to be done. We would also like to thank the Ministry of
Science, Technology and Innovation (MOSTI), Malaysia for sponsoring this work under the project
vote number 73720.
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