Colorless FDMA-PON with flexible bandwidth allocation and colorless, low-speed ONUs [invited]

We demonstrate a remotely seeded flexible passive optical network (PON) with multiple low-speed subscribers but only a single optical line terminal transceiver operating at a data rate of 31.25 Gbits/s. The scheme is based on a colorless frequency division multiplexing (FDM)-PON with centralized wavelength control. Multiplexing and demultiplexing in the optical network unit (ONU) is performed in the electronic domain and relies either on FDM with Nyquist sinc-pulse shaping or on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). This way the ONU can perform processing at low speed in the baseband. Further, the ONU is colorless by means of a remote seed for upstream transmission and a remote local oscillator for heterodyne reception, all of which helps in keeping maintenance and costs for an ONU potentially low and will simplify wavelength allocation in a future software defined network architecture. To extend the reach, semiconductor optical amplifiers are used for optical amplification in the downstream and upstream.