Design of high-performance metropolitan area network with a hybrid of CWDM and ETDM technique

Abstract

A high-performance metropolitan area network has been designed with the combination of coarse wavelength division multiplexing (CWDM) and electrical time division multiplexing (ETDM) techniques. The network consists of n access nodes with each node transmitting and receiving m wavelengths. Virtual multi-channel (VMC) has been achieved at each wavelength via ETDM technique to minimize the data blocking possibility. This network structure has high bandwidth, low communication latency and high performance-to-cost ratio. A prototype network of 6 access nodes has been implemented with 4 virtual channels at each wavelength. The data transmission speed at each wavelength is 1.25 Gbit/s. It can be upgraded to 2.5 Gbit/s. The network has high flexibility and scalability. To further expand the network capacity, multi-wavelength window CWDM technique can be adopted at 1300 nm and 1550 nm simultaneously.