A Green Open Access Optical Distribution Network with Incremental Deployment Support

This paper proposes an optical distribution network (ODN) architecture for open access networks. The proposed scheme ensures co-existence of multiple business partners (BPs) e.g., service, network equipment, and infrastructure providers at different levels of the distribution network, along with physical-layer security. Further, physical-layer isolation is provided to each subscriber, preventing network disruption by malicious subscribers. The proposed open access ODN supports BPs with different granularities (sizes) and discourages monopoly; thus, allowing multiple BPs to co-exist. It also supports incremental deployability (ID) which allows the BPs to cope with an expanding user base. Thus, small BPs can take up a market share with reasonable initial investment and grow with differential expenditures. ID further allows us to incrementally scale up the power consumption as a function of the network load, making the architecture green. The proposed ODN is based on a passive optical network (PON) architecture resulting in low operational expenditures (OpEx) and high availability. Besides a new ODN architecture, a novel architecture for the optical line terminal (OLT), based on hybrid time and wavelength-division multiplexing (TWDM), is proposed. The BPs can adopt typical TWDM, wavelength division multiplexing, or the TWDM-based OLT architecture (introduced in this paper) over the proposed ODN.