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2.5 Gb/s hybrid WDM/TDM PON using radio

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ARTICLE in OPTIK - INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR LIGHT AND ELECTRON OPTICS SEPTEMBER 2013
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Optik 124 (2013) 36783681

Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect

Optik
journal homepage: www.elsevier.de/ijleo

2.5 Gb/s hybrid WDM/TDM PON using radio over ber technique
Abdullah O. Aldhaibani a, , S. Yaakob b , R.Q. Shaddad a , S.M. Idrus a , M.Z. Abdul Kadir b ,
A.B. Mohammad a,b
a
b

Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor 81310, Malaysia

Advanced Physical Technology (APT), Telekom Malaysia (TM) RD Sdn Bhd, Lingkaran Teknokrat Timur, 63000 Cyberjaya, Selangor, Malaysia

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Received 6 June 2012
Accepted 10 November 2012

Keywords:
Radio over ber
Hybrid WDM/TDM-GPON
EVM
OSNR

a b s t r a c t
Hybrid gigabit-passive optical network (GPON) is a hybrid passive optical network, where wavelength
division multiplexing (WDM) GPON and time division multiplexing (TDM)-GPON are integrated into a
single passive optical network, reducing cost and increasing the data rate. In this paper, 2.5 Gb/s GPON
downstream link is presented, using the radio over ber (RoF) technique in GPON network architecture.
It has been done by means of commercial OptiSystem simulation software, where, differential phase shift
keying (DPSK) modulation is proposed by using 2.4 GHz radio frequency. The propagation of radio signals
along a 25 km standard single mode ber (SMF) investigated. The simulated model can support 32 and
64 users. The analysis was made based on the performance of eye diagram, optical signal to noise ratio
(OSNR), constellation diagram, error vector magnitude (EVM) and received power.
2012 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Huge demand for multimedia data, higher data-speeds, such
as high-denition video and an increasing number of users; are
putting pressure on wireless communication systems vendors to
offer higher data rates. Reducing this pressure could be achieved by
using a microcellular system, which means decreasing the cell size,
and thus, reducing the power consumption of the mobile station [1].
However, the number of base stations will increase and the network
will become very complex. These conditions drive the use of optical
ber as an efcient medium for radio network backhaul. The RoF
offers a combination of high capacity optical ber and exibility
wireless networks. This technology is introduced to reduce infrastructure cost and the complexity of remote antenna units (RAU).
Moreover, RoF technology is a candidate to enhance the performance of wireless communication systems with the combination of
large bandwidth (BW) and low attenuation characteristics offered
by optical ber [2].
The sharing of infrastructure and equipment between several
base stations (BS) through passive optical network (PON) architecture is emerging as a low cost solution [2,3]. This makes the PONs
over active deployments dominant and reported worldwide, the
GPON standard preferred in America, while Ethernet PON is the
elected standard in Asia, with more than 10 million subscribers in
Japan alone [2,3].

The characteristics of GPON technology has been standardized

by International Telecommunication Union-T (ITU-T) in Recommendation G.984 series [4]. Combining GPON architecture with
ROF technology has been done in [5], which demonstrates a lower
cost-efcient and attractive solution for the distribution of 3G
BS. Nevertheless, the demands on capacity in access networks is
increasing rapidly due to the huge number of users, making the
distribution of 4th generation (4G) base station good solution in
wireless communication systems such as WiFi and Wimax, with
radio frequency 2.4 GHz.
RoF using analog modulation on gigabit passive optical network
architecture as reported in [6], involved the distribution of eight
BSs by using WDM and splitter, with distance from 10 to 100 km.
The results were good only with 10, 20, and 50 km for BER. Afda
et al. [7], characterized the distribution of IEEE 802.11 WLAN service
using RoF technique in GPON network architecture. Good results
were obtained at the maximum ber distance of 20 km where
lower BER; and higher OSNR values as those specied as standards were observed. In addition Martin Bouda et al. have proposed
and demonstrated the cost-effectiveness of a Wavelength-Shared
Hybrid PON architecture which is a low cost solution as a number
of cells increase.
This paper focuses on the downlink part only. It presents the
transmission performance of a downstream link GPON network
with a 2.5 Gb/s bit rate.
2. Radio-over-ber (RoF) techniques

Corresponding author.
E-mail address: zeed aoa@yahoo.com (A.O. Aldhaibani).
0030-4026/$ see front matter 2012 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijleo.2012.11.013

RoF presents the distribution of radio frequency (RF) signals

over optical ber links from a central ofce to RAU. Radio over

A.O. Aldhaibani et al. / Optik 124 (2013) 36783681

ber-scheme for both down and up-link paths is demonstrated

based on digitized RF-over-ber technique. The digitized RF-overber technique is able to improve spectral efciency and minimize
hardware count, while the performance is limited by inter-channel
interference as a result of spectra aliasing of the regenerated IF
signals which limits the signal-to-noise-ratio [8]. There are many
techniques which are used to transport the RF signal to end-users
such as; RF-over-ber, intermediate frequency (IF)-over-ber, and
baseband-(IF)-over-ber. Where the rst two former schemes are
examples of analog photonic links and the last is a digital photonic
link. The RF signal is modulated at the CO in RF band and combined
with continuous wave (CW) laser by MachZehnder Modulator
(MZM), which converts the signal to optical with direct transmission through the ber to the BSs. At the BS, the signal is detected
by photo detector (PD); without any need for frequency translation at the remote BS. RF-over-ber transport has the advantage
of realizing simple base-station designs with additional benets
of centralized control, independence of the air-interface and also
enabling multiwireless band operation. However, one of its major
drawbacks is the requirement for high-optical modulation techniques that have the ability to generate speed modulated optical
signals as well as high-speed photo detection schemes that directly
convert the modulated optical signals back to signals in the RF
domain, Using the external modulator, the dispersion effect can be
minimized; thus, this is preferred most in any RoF system [9,10].
3. Hybrid structure
The need to mitigate complex and costly time-sharing of available bandwidth in TDM based PONs has led to the development of
new types of access networks that simplify network operation and
handle the ever growing bandwidth requirements. These access
networks are called WDM-PONs, which employ several independent wavelengths. Each single wavelength can carry data at rates
of up to electronic processing limits of a few Gbps [11]. PON architecture system includes three important apparatus: optical line
terminals (OLT), optical network units/optical network terminals
(ONU/ONT) and optical distribution network (ODN). The transmitters at the OLT side generate a single wavelength carrying the data
destined for a particular ONU. In OLT the RF signal is modulated
by a DPSK sequence generator and combined with CW laser at
wavelengths starting from 193.1 THz to 193.8 THz. The frequency
spacing is 100 GHz which denes the type of elements employed
in the network and the cost associated with them. For example, a
frequency spacing of 100 GHz makes the transmission Dense-WDM
(DWDM). These wavelengths are then coupled onto a single ber
using WDM Multiplexer, with specic insertion loss, located inside
the CO. The multiplexed output is, in turn, connected to a primary
single mode ber (SMF) of length 25 km which terminates on a
WDM Demultiplexer as shown in Fig. 1 [12].
The WDM Demultiplexer separates all the wavelengths, according to the way they were combined at the OLT side, and feeds each

3679

Fig. 1. WDM-PONs.

Fig. 2. Hybrid WDM/TDM.

one to a power splitter which distributes the signal to four users as

shown in Fig. 2. Photodiode detects the signal and passes it to DPSK
decoder.
The hybrid WDM/TDM GPON consists of 32 ONUs, as shown in
Fig. 2. They are separated into WDM groups sharing eight wavelengths in a WDM mode. Within each group, four ONUs share one
wavelength in a TDM mode. The TDM-PON downstream trafc is
handled by broadcasts from the OLT to all connected ONUs.
4. Simulation design
This section briey describes the simulation setup in OptiSystem
10.0. All necessary parameters are based on the GPON standardized
properties [4]. Fig. 3 shows the hybrid WDM/TDM-PON scheme. In
the CO, downlink a DPSK signal was generated. The downlink channels are multiplexed/demultiplexed by a 1xN multiplexer (MUX)
and a demultiplexer (DMUX), respectively. The multiplexed downlink DPSK signals are sent through the ber and demultiplexed at
receiver, which connects each wavelength to a splitter with a split
ratio of 4. Finally, each splitter connects to four BS. Fig. 3 shows the
schematic diagram of the simulation system, at OLT; the electrical
data signal is generated by the pseudo-random bit sequence Generator (PRBS), with 2.5 Gbps bit rate. The data is modulated by a
differential Phase Shift Keying (8DPSK) sequence generator and an
M-ary pulse generator producing M-ary signal. The M-ary signal is
fed into a quadrature modulator (QM) at 2.4 GHz combined with
A CW laser diode (LD) at frequency 193.1 THz by MachZehnder
Modulator (MZM) to convert the electrical signal to an optical signal for transport through a 25 km SMF. At the ONU in receiver, the
signal is detected by a photodiode, and fed to clock recovery in
order to recover the data stream before it is passed to a quadrature

Fig. 3. Schematic diagram downlink hybrid WDM/TDM.

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A.O. Aldhaibani et al. / Optik 124 (2013) 36783681

Table 1
General parameters.
Parameters

Value

Operation frequency
Type of modulation
Bite rate
Sequence length
Samples per bit
Fiber length
Reference wavelength

2.4 GHz
DPSK
(2.5 Gbps)
(256)
(64)
25 km
1550 nm
Fig. 6. OSNR performance based on data rate and length of ber.

demodulator. In order for the signal to be discovered by a DPSK

sequence decoder and pulsed by RZ pulse generator to get the
binary signal, the QM is connected to an M-ary threshold detector; to quantize the signal based on a suitable value of threshold
amplitudes. The constellation of signal is display by constellation
visualizer. Eye diagram tools are added to plot the M-ary signal at
the quadrature modulator output of receiver, which consist of PRBS
generator, RZ generator and eye diagram Analyzer.
5. Result and discussion
Hybrid WDM/TDM model has been successfully simulated and
analyzed by a commercial optical system simulator, OptiSystem.
The model has been constructed by following the general parameters in Table 1.
A convenient way to measure the performance of the system is
by using an eye diagram for this simulation, with reference to Fig. 4,
the eye opening is clearly indicating that the system performance
is good.
A constellation diagram is a representation of a signal modulated by a digital modulation scheme such as quadrature amplitude
modulation or differential phase-shift keying. In this simulation, we
use differential phase-shift keying (8DPSK) signal which uses 8 bits
per symbol. The number of bits in each symbol is 3, and the constellation result is given by formula 2n . The signal constellation of the
transmitter is taken from the output of M-ary pulse generator as
illustrated in Fig. 5(a). The received signal at the receiver is shown

in Fig. 5(b). It can be clearly seen that the constellation of the output
signal is similar to the input signal with some amplitude and phase
errors which will be measured by the EVM.
The OSNR performance for the varied ber length and data rates
is shown in Fig. 6. It can be seen that the OSNR at 0.1 nm bandwidth
displays a decreasing pattern along the length of the ber. In certain optical systems, the maximum value of OSNR, for 2.5 Gbps is
40 dB and the minimum is 35.2 dB; for 1.25 Gbps the maximum
value of OSNR is 41.7 dB and minimum value is 36 dB, while the
maximum value for OSNR at 1Gbps is 44 dB and minimum value
is 37.6 dB. As shown graphically in Fig. 6, the OSNR is greater over
small distances and is reduced over large distances. The OSNR is
also reduced fractionally while the data rate increased because of
increased noise.
Fig. 7 illustrates the received optical versus the ber length. The
power is found to be reduced linearly with increasing ber length
due to attenuation. The optical power at the transmitter is 0 dBm. It
can be seen from Fig. 7, that, the received optical power is 19 dBm
along 25 km ber, which means we can increase the number of
wavelengths for each splitter to eight or extend the length of ber.
The power is reduced due to attenuation, dispersion, and losses
which are contributed to by all devices of the network builder.
The EVM is dened as the root-mean-square value of the difference between a collection of the measured and the ideal symbols.
The difference is normalized by the average power per symbol in
the constellation. The values of EVM vary according to type of modulation used, such as QPSK, 16 QAM, etc. [14,15]. The following
equation is used to calculate the EVM [13]:


EVM RMS =

(1/N)

N

|S
Smeas,r |2
r1 ideal,r

(1/N)

N

r1

(1/2)

|Sideal,r |2

(1)

Fig. 8 displays the EVM of the downlink signals versus the ber
length. The results show that the EVM increase a little bit as length
of ber increases. The same gure shows that the EVM is increased
when data rate increases. Where at 50 km it is 26%, 27%, and 30.3%
for 1, 1.25, and 2.5 Gbps, respectively.
Fig. 9 shows the EVM increases to 10.3 dB as the receive power
reduces to 24 dBm [16]. It can be clearly observed from Fig. 10 that
when OSNR is increased, the EVM value is reduced.
Fig. 4. The eye diagram at the receiver of the rst ONU.

Fig. 5. The constellation of the electrical signal at the (a) transmitter and (b) receiver.

Fig. 7. The received optical power at the receiver versus the length of ber.

A.O. Aldhaibani et al. / Optik 124 (2013) 36783681

3681

and power budget have been calculated for the proposed PON. The
OSNR is reduced while the number of wavelengths increased as a
result of channel interference. Power receiver reduced to 24 dBm
at 50 km ber length. The results show that the Hybrid WDM/TDM
GPON offers a promising solution for todays communication to
support the continuous increase in the number of wireless Internet
users and demands on bandwidth.
References
Fig. 8. EVM versus ber length (downlink).

Fig. 9. EVM of different receives powers.

Fig. 10. The EVM versus OSNR.

6. Conclusion
The hybrid WDM/TDM GPON using radio over ber technique
has been introduced and analyzed. The 2.5 Gb/s hybrid GPON with
RoF with digital modulation (8DPSK) is implemented. The simulation results show that the Hybrid WDM/TDM GPON with 2.5 Gbps,
8DPSK and 2.4 GHz, gives a good performance for 3264 users over
25 km ber length. The value of EVM is increased as the distance
increases, reaching to 30.3% at 50 km. In contrast, the OSNR is
reduced to 35 dBm as the distance is increased to 50 km. Good OSNR

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