Transmission impairments in long-reach WDM-PON using RSOA-based ONUs

Abstract

The use of Reflective Optical Network Unit (ONU) in Passive Optical Networks (PON) is a very recent trend. This makes the ONU "colourless" and invokes an inherent physical layer security. A popular device of choice to implement the same is Reflective Semiconductor Optical Amplifier (RSOA). This paper presents a novel steady-state model of RSOA, along with a corresponding flow-diagram for numerical solution. It also studies the system performance through Bit-Error Rate (BER) analysis of the uplink of an RSOA based hybrid wavelength division multiplexing (WDM)-time division multiplexing (TDM) PON, with a Conventional Receiver as well as a Burst Mode Receiver (BMR). Furthermore, it investigates the feasibility of such a network under an optimum BER threshold for different network reach and number of supported users.