WDM-PON Monitoring With Tunable Photon Counting OTDR

We explore the performance of a tunable optical time domain reflectometer based on single photon detection for fault location and quantification in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM)-passive optical networks based on a 32-channel cyclic arrayed waveguide grating using the S- and C-bands for upstream (156 Mb/s) and downstream (2.5 Gb/s) transmission and the L-band for monitoring. Downstream Rayleigh and Raman scattering contributions to the dark count noise were evaluated and properly filtered out with a total WDM + filter rejection ratio of 90 dB. Upstream power was found to generate the greatest contribution to the noise floor and is the limiting factor to the upstream transmission data rate. In-service monitoring experiments with full upstream and downstream power show that the proposed scheme is able to achieve dynamic range levels of up to 32 dB with 5-m spatial resolution and no measurable penalty in data transmission.