A cost-effective WDM-PON architecture simultaneously supporting wired, wireless and optical VPN services

It is believed that next-generation passive optical networks (PONs) are required to provide flexible and various services to users in a cost-effective way. To address this issue, for the first time, this paper proposes and demonstrates a novel wavelength-division-multiplexed PON (WDM-PON) architecture to simultaneously support three types of services: 1) wireless access traffic, 2) optical virtual passive network (VPN) communications, and 3) conventional wired services. In the optical line terminal (OLT), we use two cascaded Mach-Zehnder modulators (MZMs) on each wavelength channel to generate an optical carrier, and produce the wireless and the downstream traffic using the orthogonal modulation technique. In each optical network unit (ONU), the obtained optical carrier is modulated by a single MZM to provide the VPN and upstream communications. Consequently, the light sources in the ONUs are saved and the system cost is reduced. The feasibility of our proposal is experimentally and numerically verified.