SUCCESS-DWA: a highly scalable and cost-effective optical access network

Passive optical networks have been identified as promising access solutions that can open the first-mile bottleneck, bringing gigabits-per-second data rates to end users. Current TDM PONs enjoy low cost by sharing resources in time, but suffer from limited capacity. In the future, WDM technology may be employed to achieve high performance. In this article we introduce a novel PON employing dynamic wavelength allocation to provide bandwidth sharing across multiple physical PONs. Tunable lasers, arrayed waveguide gratings, and coarse/fine filtering combine to create a flexible new optical access solution. The network´s excellent scalability can bridge the gap between conventional TDM PONs and WDM PONs. The powerful architecture is a promising candidate for next-generation optical access networks.