Cascaded splitter topology optimization in LRPONs

Cascaded Passive Optical Network (PON) has been reported as an effective approach for achieving flexible deployment of optical network units (ONUs) in metropolitan areas and possibly a great cost reduction from the operator perspectives. It serves as a promising technique to support low-cost deployment of long-reach Passive Optical Networks (LRPONs), which is one of the keys to enable a fiber to the premises (FTTP) service provisioning scenario. Motivated by its future-proving importance, this paper investigates a dimensioning task which revisits the cascaded splitter topology for the LRPON new scenario. We formulate and solve the splitter topology and placement optimization problem with the objective of deployment cost minimization using Integer linear programming (ILP). Two different schemes with or without cascade splitting topology are developed and implemented via case studies. The case study results show that the cascaded splitter topology is way more cost-effective, economical, and suitable in the deployment of LRPON for FTTP in practice.