Impact of Mode-Partition Noise in the Performance of 10 Gbit/s Ethernet Passive Optical Networks

The enormous success of Ethernet passive optical network (EPON) deployment has been inciting the development of upgrades for this system, namely the data rate upgrade. In these upgraded next generation access networks, low-cost and simplicity should play a fundamental role, and so the use of low cost multimode laser sources should be considered. However, impairments such as Mode-Partition Noise (MPN) will arise and will affect the performance of the network. This paper presents an evaluation of the impact of MPN in 10 Gbit/s EPONs that employ multimode laser sources. It is shown that MPN may have a severe impact, but the use of Forward Error Correction (FEC) is considered as a way to mitigate this effect.