PASSIVE OPTICAL NETWORKS

A passive optical network (PON) is a point-to-multipoint, fiber to the premises network architecture in which unpowered optical splitters are used to enable a single optical fiber to serve multiple premises, typically 16-128. A PON consists of an optical line terminal (OLT) at the service provider's central office and a number of optical network units (ONUs) near end users. A PON configuration reduces the amount of fiber and central office equipment required compared with point to point architectures. A passive optical network is a form of fiber-optic access network. Downstream signals are broadcast to all premises sharing a single fiber. Encryption is used to prevent eavesdropping. Upstream signals are combined using a multiple access protocol, usually time division multiple access (TDMA). The OLTs "range" the ONUs in order to provide time slot assignments for upstream communication.

There are two major standards. One standard is controlled by the IEEE which defines Ethernet Networking Standards. The Second is controlled by the ITU-T which controls Telecommunications Standards. Both organisations produced separate and incompatible 1Gigabit and 10Gigabit standards. IEEE 802.3 EPON (Ethernet PON) is part of IEEE standard Ethernet with options for 1/1 Gbit/s 10/1 Gbit/s and 10/10 Gbit/s. There are currently over 40 million installed EPON ports making it the most widely deployed PON technology globally. EPON is also the foundation for cable operators business services as part of the DOCSIS Provisioning of EPON (DPoE) specifications. ITU-T G.983 APON (ATM PON). This was the first Passive optical network standard. It was used primarily for business applications, and was based on ATM. BPON (Broadband PON) is a standard based on APON. It adds support for WDM, dynamic and higher upstream bandwidth allocation, and survivability. It also created a standard management interface, called OMCI, between the OLT and ONU/ONT, enabling mixed-vendor networks. G.984 G-PON (Gigabit PON) is an evolution of the BPON standard. It supports higher rates, enhanced security, and choice of Layer 2 protocol (ATM, GEM, Ethernet). By mid-2008, Verizon had installed over 800 thousand lines. British Telecom, Mobily-SaudiArabia, Etisalat-UAE, and AT&T are in advanced trials. It is the successor to G.983. GPON networks have now been deployed in numerous carrier networks across the globe, and the trends indicate higher growth in GPON than other PON technologies.

G.987 10G-PON has 10 Gbit/s downstream and 2.5 Gbit/s upstream framing is "G-PON like" and designed to coexist with GPON devices on the same network. SCTE 174 RFoG (RFoverGlass) is an SCTE Standard for carrying HFC RF signals over a passive optical Network (PON).

Network elements
A PON takes advantage of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), using one wavelength for downstream traffic and another for upstream traffic on a single nondispersion-shifted fiber (ITU-T G.652). BPON, EPON, GEPON, and GPON have the same basic wavelength plan and use the 1,490 nanometer (nm) wavelength for downstream traffic and 1310 nm wavelength for upstream traffic. 1550 nm is reserved for optional overlay services, typically RF (analog) video. As with bit rate, the standards describe several optical budgets, most common is 28 dB of loss budget for both BPON and GPON, but products have been announced using less expensive optics as well. 28 dB corresponds to about 20 km with a 32-way split. Forward error correction (FEC) may provide another 23 dB of loss budget on GPON systems. As optics improve, the 28 dB budget will likely increase. Although both the GPON and EPON protocols permit large split ratios (up to 128 subscribers for GPON, up to 32,768 for EPON), in practice most PONs are deployed with a split ratio of 1x32 or smaller. A PON consists of a central office node, called an optical line terminal (OLT), one or more user nodes, called optical network units (ONUs) or optical network terminals (ONTs), and the fibers and splitters between them, called the optical distribution network (ODN). ONT is an ITU-T term to describe a special, single-user case of an ONU. In Multiple Tenant Units, the ONU may be bridged to a customer premise device within the individual dwelling unit using technologies such as Ethernet over twisted pair, G.hn (a high-speed ITU-T standard that can operate over any existing home wiring - power lines, phone lines and coaxial cables) or DSL. An ONU is a device that terminates the PON and presents customer service interfaces to the user. Some ONUs implement a separate subscriber unit to provide services such as telephony, Ethernet data, or video. The OLT provides the interface between the PON and the service providers network services. These typically include: Internet Protocol (IP) traffic over gigabit/s, 10 Gbit/s, or 100 Mbit/s Ethernet standard time division multiplexed (TDM) interfaces such as SONET or SDH ATM UNI at 155622 Mbit/s The ONT or ONU terminates the PON and presents the native service interfaces to the user. These services can include voice (plain old telephone service (POTS) or voice over IP (VoIP)), data (typically Ethernet or V.35), video, and/or telemetry (TTL, ECL, RS530, etc.). Often, the ONU functions are separated into two parts: 1) the ONU, which terminates the PON and presents a converged interface such as xDSL,

coax, or multiservice Ethernet toward the user 2)network termination equipment (NTE), which provides the separate, native service interfaces directly to the user A PON is a shared network, in that the OLT sends a single stream of downstream traffic that is seen by all ONUs. Each ONU only reads the content of those packets that are addressed to it. Encryption is used to prevent eavesdropping on downstream traffic.

Upstream bandwidth allocation

The OLT is responsible for allocating upstream bandwidth to the ONUs. Because the optical distribution network (ODN) is shared, ONU upstream transmissions could collide if they were transmitted at random times. ONUs can lie at varying distances from the OLT, meaning that the transmission delay from each ONU is unique. The OLT measures delay and sets a register in each ONU via PLOAM (physical layer operations and maintenance) messages to equalize its delay with respect to all of the other ONUs on the PON. Once the delay of all ONUs has been set, the OLT transmits so-called grants to the individual ONUs. A grant is permission to use a defined interval of time for upstream transmission. The grant map is dynamically re-calculated every few milliseconds. The map allocates bandwidth to all ONUs, such that each ONU receives timely bandwidth for its service needs. Some services POTS, for example require essentially constant upstream bandwidth, and the OLT may provide a fixed bandwidth allocation to each such service that has been provisioned. DS1 and some classes of data service may also require constant upstream bit rate. But much data traffic internet surfing, for example is bursty and highly variable. Through dynamic bandwidth allocation (DBA), a PON can be oversubscribed for upstream traffic, according to the traffic engineering concepts of statistical multiplexing. (Downstream traffic can also be oversubscribed, in the same way that any LAN can be oversubscribed. The only special feature in the PON architecture for downstream oversubscription is the fact that the ONU must be able to accept completely arbitrary downstream time slots, both in time and in size.) In GPON there are two forms of DBA, status-reporting (SR) and non-status reporting (NSR). In NSR DBA, the OLT continuously allocates a small amount of extra bandwidth to each ONU. If the ONU has no traffic to send, it transmits idle frames during its excess allocation. If the OLT observes that a given ONU is not sending idle frames, it increases the bandwidth allocation to that ONU. Once the ONU's burst has been transferred, the OLT observes a large number of idle frames from the given ONU, and reduces its allocation accordingly. NSR DBA has the advantage that it imposes no requirements on the ONU, and the disadvantage that there is no way for the OLT to know how best to assign bandwidth across several ONUs that need more. In SR DBA, the OLT polls ONUs for their backlogs. A given ONU may have several so-called transmission containers (T-CONTs), each with its own priority or traffic class. The ONU reports each T-CONT separately to the OLT. The report message contains a logarithmic measure of the backlog in the T-CONT queue. By knowledge of the service level agreement for each T-CONT across the entire PON, as well as the size of each T-CONT's backlog, the OLT can optimize allocation of the spare bandwidth on the PON.

EPON systems use a DBA mechanism equivalent to GPON's SR DBA solution. The OLT polls ONUs for their queue status and grants bandwidth using the MPCP GATE message, while ONUs report their status using the MPCP REPORT message.

TDM-PON
Both APON/BPON and EPON/GEPON have been deployed widely, but most networks designed in 2008 use GPON or GEPON. GPON has fewer than 2 million installed ports. GEPON has approximately 30 million deployed ports. For TDM-PON, a passive power splitter is used as the remote terminal. Each ONUs (Optical network units) signals are multiplexed in the time domain. ONUs see their own data through the address labels embedded in the signal.

WDM-PON
Wavelength Division Multiplexing PON, or WDM-PON, is a non-standard type of passive optical networking, being developed by some companies. The multiple wavelengths of a WDM-PON can be used to separate Optical Network Units (ONUs) into several virtual PONs co-existing on the same physical infrastructure. Alternatively the wavelengths can be used collectively through statistical multiplexing to provide efficient wavelength utilization and lower delays experienced by the ONUs. There is no common standard for WDM-PON nor any unanimously agreed upon definition of the term. By some definitions WDM-PON is a dedicated wavelength for each ONU. Other more liberal definitions suggest the use of more than one wavelength in any one direction on a PON is WDM-PON. It is difficult to point to an un-biased list of WDM-PON vendors when there is no such unanimous definition. PONs provide higher bandwidth than traditional copper based access networks. WDM-PON has better privacy and better scalability because of each ONU only receives its own wavelength. Advantages: The MAC layer is simplified because the P2P connections between OLT and ONUs are realized in wavelength domain, so no P2MP media access control is needed. In WDM-PON each wavelength can run at a different speed and protocol so there is an easy pay-as-you-grow upgrade Challenges: High cost of initial set-up, the cost of the WDM components. Temperature control is another challenge because of how wavelengths tend to drift with environmental temperatures.

Long-Reach Optical Access Networks

The concept of the Long-Reach Optical Access Network (LROAN) is to replace the optical/electrical/optical conversion that takes place at the local exchange with a continuous optical path that extends from the customer to the core of the network. Work by Davey and Payne at BT showed that significant cost savings could be made by reducing the electronic equipment and real-estate required at the local exchange or wire center. A proof of concept demonstrator showed that it was possible to serve 1024 at 10GBit/s with 100 km reach. This technology has sometimes been termed Long-Reach PON, however, many argue that the term PON is no longer applicable as, in most instances, only the distribution remains passive.

Enabling technologies
Due to the topology of PON, the transmission modes for downstream (i.e., from OLT to ONU) and upstream (i.e., from ONU to OLT) are different. For the downstream transmission, the OLT broadcasts optical signal to all the ONUs in continuous mode (CM), i.e., the downstream channel always has optical data signal. However, in the upstream channel, ONUs can not transmit optical data signal in CM. Use of CM would result in all of the signals transmitted from the ONUs converging (with attenuation) into one fiber by the power splitter (serving as power coupler), and overlapping. To solve this problem, burst mode (BM) transmission is adopted for upstream channel. The given ONU only transmits optical packet when it is allocated a time slot and it needs to transmit, and all the ONUs share the upstream channel in the time division multiplexing (TDM) mode. The phases of the BM optical packets received by the OLT are different from packet to packet, since the ONUs are not synchronized to transmit optical packet in the same phase, and the distance between OLT and given ONU are random. Since the distance between the OLT and ONUs are not uniform, the optical packets received by the OLT may have different amplitudes. In order to compensate the phase variation and amplitude variation in a short time (e.g., within 40 ns for GPON[4]), burst mode clock and data recovery (BM-CDR) and burst mode amplifier (e.g., burst mode TIA) need to be employed, respectively. Furthermore, the BM transmission mode requires the transmitter to work in burst mode. Such a burst mode transmitter is able to turn on and off in short time. The above three kinds of circuitries in PON are quite different from their counterparts in the point-to-point continuous mode optical communication link.

Fiber to the premises

Main article: Fiber to the x Passive optical networks do not use electrically powered components to split the signal. Instead, the signal is distributed using beam splitters. Each splitter typically splits the signal from a single fiber into 16, 32, or 64 fibers, depending on the manufacturer, and several splitters can be aggregated in a single cabinet. A beam splitter cannot provide any switching or buffering capabilities; the resulting connection is called a point-to-multipoint link. For such a connection, the optical network terminals on the customer's end must perform some special functions which would not otherwise be required. For example, due to the absence of switching capabilities, each signal leaving the central office must be broadcast to all users served by that splitter (including to those for whom the signal is not intended). It is therefore up to the optical network terminal to filter out any signals intended for other customers. In addition, since beam splitters cannot perform buffering, each individual optical network terminal must be coordinated in a multiplexing scheme to prevent signals leaving the customer from colliding at the intersection. Two types of multiplexing are possible for achieving this: wavelength-division multiplexing and time-division multiplexing. With wavelength-division multiplexing, each customer transmits their signal using a unique wavelength. With time-division multiplexing (TDM), the customers "take turns" transmitting information. TDM equipment has been on the market longest; WDM-PON equipment became available in 2005.

PON Advantages
o Very high speed data up to 1 Gbit/s to home and businesses o Maintenance cost reduction due to no electronics between CO and customers o Low cost due to fiber and CO interface shared by several customers o Constant data rate regardless of reach o Multiple applications including data (IP), video and voice (triple play) Passive optical networks have both advantages and disadvantages over active networks. They avoid the complexities involved in keeping electronic equipment operating outdoors. They also allow for analog broadcasts, which can simplify the delivery of analog television. However, because each signal must be pushed out to everyone served by the splitter (rather than to just a single switching device), the central office must be equipped with a particularly powerful piece of transmitting equipment called an optical line terminal (OLT). In addition, because each customer's optical network terminal must transmit all the way to the central office (rather than to just the nearest switching device), customers can't be as far from the central office as is possible with active optical networks.

TARUNDEEP SINGH
Deptt of Electronics and comm email : [email protected]