Control aspects of a TDMA system for passive optical networks

The authors describe a time-division multiple-access (TDMA) system developed at British Telecom Research Laboratories for telephony over passive optical networks (TPON). The system is called the TPON Bit Transport System (BTS). A bit-interleaved technique coupled with efficient control protocols facilitates the design of reliable, low-complexity, and low-power-consumption TPON hardware at both head-end and remote node. The BTS subsystem for the remote node has been successfully integrated in two ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) devices and the BTS head-end supporting up to 128 nodes is contained within a compact plug-in module. The main elements of the embedded BTS control system for implementing and supervising an actively ranged bit-interleaved TDMA protocol are described