Design of Directly Modulated Long-Reach PONs Reaching 125 km for Provisioning of Hybrid Wired–Wireless Quintuple-Play Service

Abstract

Design tools for the quintuple-play service provisioning in a long-reach passive optical network (LR-PON) using off-the-shelf directly modulated lasers (DMLs) are experimentally demonstrated. The quintuple-play service including broadband wired Internet, phone/voice data, wireless high-definition TV, wireless data, and home security/control is provided by a radio-over-fiber bundle of multi-format orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals. This bundle occupies a multi-octave band and consists of a full-standard worldwide-interoperability-for-microwave access signal, a long-term evolution signal, two ultra-wideband channels, and an ad hoc OFDM signal providing gigabit Ethernet connectivity. Dynamic centralized impairment compensation, fixed optical dispersion compensation, proper selection of the multiplexed signal level applied to the DML, and unbalanced power sharing between the different OFDM-based signal formats are shown as effective design tools for the delivery of the quintuple-play service to end-users. The experimental validation confirms that the DMLs are an effective solution to deliver the quintuple-play service to end-users 125 km away from the central office. Additionally, it is shown that the directly modulated LR-PON employing negative residual dispersion is able to provide the quintuple-play service to end-users located between 75 and 125 km away from the central office with an error vector magnitude (EVM) margin, relative to the EVM stated in each signal standard, by more than 1 dB. Therefore, the proposed directly modulated LR-PON is a cost-effective alternative to networks using external modulation for the provision of wireless and wired quintuple-play service to end-users using a single hybrid network.