Effects of Upstream Incoherent Crosstalk Caused by ASE Noise from Tx-Disabled ONUs in XG-PONs and TWDM-PONs

Abstract

A large incoherent crosstalk (IC) caused by amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise power from Tx-disabled optical network units and a differential path loss has been shown to degrade upstream transmission performance in time-division multiplexing passive optical networks. This paper considers the IC-induced power penalty of an upstream signal both in an XG-PON and in a TWDM-PON. We investigate the degradation of the extinction ratio and relative intensity noise through a simulation and experiments. For the XG-PON case, we observe a 9.6 dB difference in the level of ASE noise power from Tx-disabled ONUs (hereafter known simply as ASE noise) between our result and the ITU-T XG-PON PMD recommendation. We propose an optical filtering method to mitigate an IC-induced power penalty. In the TWDM-PON case, the IC-induced power penalty is naturally negligible because the ASE noise is filtered by a wavelength multiplexer at the optical line terminal. The results provide design guidelines for the level of ASE noise in both XG-PONs and TWDM-PONs.