Real-Time Demonstration of Concurrent Upstream and Inter-ONU Communications in Hybrid OFDM DFMA PONs

This paper presents the first real-time experimental demonstration of concurrent upstream and inter-ONU communications in a hybrid OFDM DFMA PON, enabled by a simple low-cost alteration to the remote node. Real-time FPGA-based DSP, incorporating a 128-pt FFT and a joint sideband processing technique, is used to demultiplex different sub-wavelength channels at the ONU and OLT receivers. The simple modification in the remote node removes the need for direct user-to-user data to pass via the OLT and core network thus providing ultra-low latency inter-ONU connectivity to support a variety of newly emerging latency sensitive 5G services. The presented PON is validated with two subwavelength bands, each capable of carrying one of two possible orthogonal channels ( I or Q ). The dynamic channel and subcarrier allocation allows flexible allocation of PON capacity between upstream and inter-ONU links for dynamic on-demand capacity allocation and also performance optimisation according to the different length dependent link characteristics. Moreover, the backscattering effect associated with upstream signals is shown to have negligible effect on the BER performance of the inter-ONU communications

DFT-Spread Spectrally Overlapped Hybrid OFDM-Digital Filter Multiple Access IMDD PONs

A novel transmission technique—namely, a DFT-spread spectrally overlapped hybrid OFDM–digital filter multiple access (DFMA) PON based on intensity modulation and direct detection (IMDD)—is here proposed by employing the discrete Fourier transform (DFT)-spread technique in each optical network unit (ONU) and the optical line terminal (OLT). Detailed numerical simulations are carried out to identify optimal ONU transceiver parameters and explore their maximum achievable upstream transmission performances on the IMDD PON systems. The results show that the DFT-spread technique in the proposed PON is effective in enhancing the upstream transmission performance to its maximum potential, whilst still maintaining all of the salient features associated with previously reported PONs. Compared with previously reported PONs excluding DFT-spread, a significant peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) reduction of over 2 dB is achieved, leading to a 1 dB reduction in the optimal signal clipping ratio (CR). As a direct consequence of the PAPR reduction, the proposed PON has excellent tolerance to reduced digital-to-analogue converter/analogue-to-digital converter (DAC/ADC) bit resolution, and can therefore ensure the utilization of a minimum DAC/ADC resolution of only 6 bits at the forward error correction (FEC) limit (1 × 10−3). In addition, the proposed PON can improve the upstream power budget by >1.4 dB and increase the aggregate upstream signal transmission rate by up to 10% without degrading nonlinearity tolerances