80-Gb/s Conventional Hybrid TDM/WDM PON with 256-Split Based on Remotely-Pumped Network-Embedded Self-Tuning Transmitter DRAFT

We present a conventional hybrid stacked-WDM/TDM-PON system based on a colorless network embedded self-tuning transmitter assisted by a remotely pumped erbium-doped double-pass amplifier located at the remote node. The scheme provides up to 256-split PON with 80-Gb/s aggregate upstream capacity obtained with RSOA direct modulation at 2.5Gb/s. Introduction Nowadays attention is focused on envisaging a solution for next generation access networks (NGANs). It is likely that bandwidth utilization efficiency will rely on the need satisfaction of different users, which will probably repose on different passive optical network (PON) 1 systems . It has been demonstrated that an hybrid approach between time division multiplexed (TDM) and wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) PON is able to bundle several PON branches with WDM technology accommodating several conventional PON systems and satisfying different users need 2 (Fig.1 a). Recently it has been demonstrated a unconventional hybrid TDM/WDM PON using self-seeded reflective semiconductor optical amplifiers (RSOA), providing a 512-split PON 3 with 20Gb/s aggregated upstream capacity . They overlay multiple WDM PONs on a legacy optical distribution network deployed for TDM PONs (Fig.1 b). This unconventional scheme is motivated by the fact that colorless RSOA based self-seeded transmitters heavily suffer from 4 cavity insertion losses , thus power splitting for TDM overlay is performed after wavelength demultiplexing (in upstream direction).