A Passive Optical Network with Shared Transceivers for Dynamical Resource Allocation

This paper presents a new passive optical network (PON) architecture that applies an optical multicast capable switch (OMS) to direct wavelengths to a set of PON branches and enables them to share the transceivers in the central office (CO) on demand. The OMS is composed of fiber splitters and switching gates, and by controlling the on-off gates the wavelengths at the inputs can reach any outputs of the OMS. Through the OMS configuration, logical PONs are dynamically formed according to changing traffic patterns, and traffic is further scheduled in the time domain within each logical PON. The proposed network achieves network resource sharing without requiring tunable transceivers or wavelength filters, and without changing deployed network devices in the field or at the user end. Analysis and experimental study results show the efficiency of resource sharing and demonstrate the concept of resource sharing among PON branches.