Carrier-grade enhancements of optical access and metro WDM networks

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At present, there is a strong worldwide push toward bringing optical fiber closer to homes and businesses, leading to fiber to the home/fiber to the premises networks. Typically, these optical broadband access networks are realized as passive optical networks (PONs) due to their longevity and cost savings. Most of today's deployed PONs are single-channel systems, where the fiber infrastructure carries a single upstream wavelength channel and a single downstream wavelength channel. To support future ever increasingly bandwidth-hungry applications and services in a cost-effective and future-proof manner, future PONs need to evolve from single-channel systems to multi-channel systems by means of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM). The benefits of the resultant WDM PONs are manifold. Adding the wavelength dimension to PONs can be exploited to increase the network capacity, improve the network scalability by accommodating more end users, as well as separate services and service providers. Apart from WDM upgrading current PONs, there are several other important trends in optical broadband access networks. Most notably, recent research efforts have been focusing on extending the optical range of PONs and integrating them with optical metro networks. By consolidating optical access and metro networks and thereby reducing costly optical-electrical-optical conversions at intermediate network nodes the capital and operational expenditures of optical access-metro WDM networks can be reduced significantly. Another important observation is the fact that Ethernet technologies are widely deployed to support enterprise and video services and are currently undergoing carrier-grade upgrades in order to meet the strict requirements of service providers and network operators. This proposal aims at identifying state-of-the-art equipment that is crucial to set up a powerful optical access and metro WDM carrier-grade Ethernet network infrastructure that enables researchers and students to experimentally investigate carrier-grade enhancements of optical access and metro WDM networks and explore new research avenues to further extend their functionalities while reducing their cost and complexity.