Carrier-grade enhancements of optical access and metro WDM networks

目前，全球范围内都在大力推动光纤离家庭和企业更近，从而形成光纤到户/光纤到户网络。通常，这些光宽带接入网被实现为无源光网络（pon），因为它们寿命长且成本低。目前部署的大多数pon都是单通道系统，其中光纤基础设施承载单个上游波长通道和单个下游波长通道。为了以经济高效和面向未来的方式支持未来日益增长的带宽需求应用和服务，未来的pon需要通过波分复用（WDM）从单通道系统发展到多通道系统。由此产生的波分复用pon的好处是多方面的。在pon中增加波长维度可以增加网络容量，通过容纳更多的终端用户，以及独立的业务和服务提供商来提高网络的可扩展性。除了WDM对现有pon进行升级外，光宽带接入网还有其他几个重要的发展趋势。最值得注意的是，最近的研究工作集中在扩展pon的光范围和将它们与光城域网络集成上。通过合并光接入网和城域网，从而减少中间网络节点上昂贵的光-电-光转换，光接入网-城域WDM网的资本和运营支出可以显著减少。另一个重要的观察结果是，以太网技术被广泛部署以支持企业和视频业务，并且目前正在进行运营商级升级，以满足服务提供商和网络运营商的严格要求。该提案旨在确定最先进的设备，这些设备对于建立强大的光接入和城域WDM载波级以太网网络基础设施至关重要，使研究人员和学生能够实验性地研究光接入和城域WDM网络的载波级增强，并探索新的研究途径，以进一步扩展其功能，同时降低其成本和复杂性。

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.