Photonics for Solving Unbundling in Next-Generation WDM-PON

Modern telecommunication networks are quickly evolving from passive content use to an evolutionary and much more participative social model that demands huge capacity, low power consumption, and low cost. Wavelength-division-multiplexing passive optical network (WDM PON) represents one of the current solutions to meet different network requirements. Nevertheless, in order to fully exploit the potential of WDM PON, unbundling issues still require a more efficient management, specially when the network connections get higher, to achieve high flexibility, scalability, minimum hiring together with low power consumption and low cost. Here, unbundling in WDM PON is handled in optical domain in order to exploit the higher bandwidth optics can offer with respect to electronics, avoiding high power consuming due to optical-electrical-optical (OEO) conversions. The use of photonic signal processing enables not only high bit rate but also scalability, easy reconfigurability, modularity, minimum number of fiber links, and “pay as you grow” strategy implementation. An innovative architecture based on WDM/time-division-multiplexing conversion is proposed, and all required all-optical subsystems are experimentally demonstrated, as proof of concept, exploiting nonlinear optical fiber. Power penalty lower than 3 dB is verified for each optical block. Power requirements for each subsystem are also reported. Moreover, the use of new integrated technologies can strongly reduce power consumption footprint and implementations cost.