A study on bandwidth-efficient passive optical network for local area network applications

Abstract

Recently, there has been an explosive growth of the Internet traffic, driven primarily by a rapid increase of Internet subscribers as well as a various multimedia services such as voice, video, and data. The use of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology has substantially increased the capacity of backbone networks. By exploiting the WDM technology, optical networks have expanded from backbone networks to metropolitan networks to deliver high bandwidth services to the users in a seamless fashion with reduced cost. At the same time, the performance of end-users computing equipment has reached gigahertz speeds. However, in access networks, digital subscriber line (DSL) and cable modem technologies which are the most widely deployed broadband solutions today can not provide relatively enough bandwidth for rich multimedia and real-time services. As a result, a bottleneck occurs between the backbone networks and the high-capacity local area networks (LANs). A new technology is required what is inexpensive, simple, scalable, and capable of delivering voice, data and video services to an end user over a single network. The passive optical network (PON) can potentially offer the most cost-effective solution as the optical network is shared between a number of end users. PONs have significant advantage over competing access technologies as it easily allow upgrades in bandwidth and the number of users making it a future-proof solution for service providers. In addition, advanced functionalities have to added over the existing PON system. This dissertation addresses an advanced functionality that is local networking capability over the legacy PON infrastructure. As more and more users are connected to PON environment, local networking has become an important part of the access networks. Current PON systems can this internetworking by the use of a router attached to an optical line terminal (OLT) in conjunction with a scheme called shared LAN emulation. Ther...