Dimensioning hybrid PONs

We investigate FTTX (Fiber-to-the Home/Premises/Curb) Passive Optical Networks (PON) for the deployment of broadband access networks such that the opportunities of optical fiber enabled technologies as well as of passive switching equipment can be exploited. We focus on designing the best possible architectures of hybrid FTTX PONs, which embraces both TDM and WDM technology. Advantages of hybrid PONs are twofold: they can (i) offer increased data rate to each user by employing WDM technology, (ii) provide flexible bandwidth utilization by employing TDM technology. We propose a novel network design optimization scheme for greenfield deployment of a set of hybrid PONs. For a given geographical location of an optical line terminal (OLT), a set of optical network units (ONUs) and their corresponding aggregated traffic demand, our proposed optimization scheme determines the design and dimensioning of the most economical set of hybrid PON networks while satisfying unicast/multicast traffic demands and taking into account the signal attenuation constraints. Computational experiments have been conducted on a set of up to 512 ONUs in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme.