Optical coding monitoring system for emerging fibre-to-the-home networks

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Fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) is the evolving solution for the last/first mile telecom bottleneck. Extensive FTTH deployments have been carried out in North America and Japan over recent years. The demand for FTTH services is growing at 80% per year compared to 3% for DSL in Japan. The number of customers sharing the same fibre is currents ranges from 16 to 32 and near term industry forecast predict ranges from 64 to 128. Industrial and academic laboratories already report 1024 customers sharing the same fibre by means of time division multiplexing together with wavelength division multiplexing of passive optical networks (TDM/WDM-PON). The need re-mains for centralized monitoring of these complex optical network infrastructures, and many technologic challenges remain. Indeed, no known product, nor technology, offers a serious solution for high capacity PONs sup-porting more than 20 to 30 customers per fibre.We propose to develop an alpha prototype of a monitoring system for an FTTH-PON with a minimum capacity of 128 customers, using our patent-pending optical coding technology. The technology is mature, while application of the technology to monitoring is new. We have examined the capacity of our solution via simulation, and find a monitoring capacity of hundreds to thousand of customers per fibre. Our technology has the potential to fulfill the near and long term industry requirements.   Key features of our technology include its simplicity, the maturity of the components (exploits of the shelf components), low cost components, and its inherent ability to allow centralized monitoring, thus giving telecom service providers full information and control of their networking infrastructure. Alternative solutions have only achieved a very early research state, are impractical, and lack supervisory and troubleshooting information that is crucial to service providers. Our solution of high capacity In-Service FTTH monitoring equipment uses a simple and mature optical coding technology that calls on only one wavelength inside the standard U band (1650 nm in compliance with ITU-T L.41).