Burst-mode FEC performance for PON upstream channels with EDFA optical transients

The performance of forward error correction (FEC) based on Reed-Solomon coding is analyzed experimentally for a burst-mode upstream channel within a passive optical network (PON) testbed. During this analysis, the upstream FEC performance is impaired by inducing correlated and localized errors within the burst through the injection of optical transients. These transients emulate the optical signal variation associated with the add-and-drop events of wavelength channels within a long-reach optical link based on a chain of erbium doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs). The robustness of the FEC has been analyzed by measuring the post-FEC bit error rate (BER) as a function of the amplitude of the emulated transients and their delay with respect to the transmitted bursts. A margin of approximately 4dB is demonstrated for the transient amplitude before the FEC degradation. Furthermore, while the post-FEC BER is strongly degraded by the emulated transients, the preFEC BER stays below the FEC threshold, demonstrating the importance of measuring the post-FEC BER in order to correctly characterize the FEC performance in PON upstream channels affected by optical transients

SDN enabled dynamically reconfigurable high capacity optical access architecture for converged services

Dynamically reconfigurable time-division multiplexing (TDM) dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) long-reach passive optical networks (PONs) can support the reduction of nodes and network interfaces by enabling a fully meshed flat optical core. In this paper we demonstrate the flexibility of the TDM-DWDM PON architecture, which can enable the convergence of multiple service types on a single physical layer. Heterogeneous services and modulation formats, i.e. residential 10G PON channels, business 100G dedicated channel and wireless fronthaul, are demonstrated co-existing on the same long reach TDM-DWDM PON system, with up to 100km reach, 512 users and emulated system load of 40 channels, employing amplifier nodes with either erbium doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) or semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs). For the first time end-to-end software defined networking (SDN) management of the access and core network elements is also implemented and integrated with the PON physical layer in order to demonstrate two service use cases: a fast protection mechanism with end-to-end service restoration in the case of a primary link failure; and dynamic wavelength allocation (DWA) in response to an increased traffic demand