A study on wavelength division multiplexing passive optical network - art. no. 67834P

Passive optical network (PON) is viewed by many as an attractive solution to the last mile bottleneck, since it can provide much higher bandwidth compared to the traditional copper-based network. In the standard PON, there is only one wavelength for upstream channel by time division multiplexing technology and another wavelength for downstream channel using broadcasting and selective receiving. Therefore, it can not meet for bandwidth-intensive services emerging recently. Fortunately, incorporating wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology in a PON (WDM-PON) can employ several wavelengths for upstream channel and downstream channel separately, and provide much higher bandwidth than the TDM-PON. So WDM-PON is considered to be the future-proof solution of access optical networks. In this paper, the development trend of WDM-PON architecture is revealed, and some hot technical issues and prospects are also present.