OSA/OFC/NFOEC 2011

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Cost-Effective and Power-Efficient Extended-Reach WDM/TDM PON Systems

Hao Feng, Chang-Joon Chae, and An V. Tran
National ICT Australia, Ltd (NICTA)-Victoria Research Laboratory, Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, the University of Melbourne, 3010, Vic, Australia, h.feng@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au

Abstract: We propose a remote channel combine/split module for extended-reach WDM/TDM PON systems to significantly reduce initial investment with saving up to 60% and achieve good power efficiency when fully loaded with saving up to 35%.
OCIS codes: (060.0060) Fiber optics and optical communications; (060.4250) Networks

1. Introduction Nowadays fibers are being deployed in the access networks to meet growing broadband service demand and TDMbased passive optical network (PON) systems are considered as one of the most cost-effective solutions. To achieve the same level of cost effectiveness for rural regions and for further cost reduction in the metro areas, operators are exploring extended-reach PON systems. Among many system architectures proposed so far, WDM/TDM PON [1] is very attractive as it offers high split ratio and saves a large amount of feeder fibers through the use of WDM. However, there are practical issues to be resolved before considering mass commercial deployment. If such systems are deployed with one-off investment in the initial stage when take-up rates (the ratio of subscribed customers over maximum system-supported customers) are quite low, it would impose a huge financial burden on the operators. According to a recent report [2], the average take-up rate in North America is approximately 30% over 9 year construction period. Moreover, an important issue of power consumption arises when the systems are operated in their full capacity regardless of the actual take-up rate or the level of traffic demand, adding operational cost to the already-made capital investment. Although numerous works have been done to evaluate the cost effectiveness or compare power consumption among various access schemes [3-6], little attention has been made to provide a solution to the above mentioned problems. In this paper, we propose to resolve the issues by inserting a channel combine/split module (CCS) in the remote active node of a WDM/TDM PON system. The module helps to realize significant reduction of capital investment under low take-up rates with up to 60% cost saving. It also helps to achieve large power saving up to 35% when operating in full load. We also experimentally demonstrate the proposed system with good performance. 2. System Description A typical extended-reach WDM/TDM PON system is illustrated with three upstream channels in Fig. 1(a), the downstream version can be realized with the direction of amplifiers reversed and the circulators removed as seed light is not required for downstream transmission. A CCS module is inserted between remote node amplifiers and splitters. Downstream signals from optical line terminals (OLTs) are multiplexed by an arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) at a central office. Then a bidirectional Er-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) is used to boost signal power for long distance transmission. The single mode fiber (SMF) represents a feeder fiber of 50 km to 100 km or a distribution fiber of up to 10 or 20 km. A typical remote node consists of an AWG to demultiplex the downstream signals to different TDM PONs, and two in-line amplifiers to compensate the component and fiber losses. For upstream transmission, tunable laser diodes (TLDs) are employed to provide seed light for reflective semiconductor optical amplifiers (RSOAs) used as colorless transmitters. There will be active and inactive optical network terminals (ONTs) in the network, which are indicated with o and x, respectively.
AWG1 AWG2 CCS SMF

OLT 1

EDFA

SMF TLD 1

(Active) x (Inactive) x x x x x

SW

CCS

SW
D1

CCS

D1

U1

U1 U1 U1
Combiner

OLT 2 OLT 3 TLD 2

D2 D3
Splitter

D1 D1

U 2 U 3

(a) (b) (c) Fig. 1 (a) upstream link of WDM/TDM PON with a remote CCS, (b) downstream and (c) upstream configurations of the CCS. OLT: Optical line terminal, AWG: Arrayed waveguide grating, EDFA: Er-doped fiber amplifier, TLD: Tunable laser, SW: optical switch

TLD 3

Optical Society of America

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The key function of CCS is to selectively aggregate optical signals from active subscribers such that a minimal number of OLTs and remote amplifiers are operated. This helps reduce initial infrastructure cost by invest-ascustomer-comes approach and also reduce power consumption in the operational stage. CCS module is consisted of a set of splitters (splitters also act as combiners function for upstream transmission) and optical switches, where the number of switches is equal to the number of TDM PONs. When each PON is operated using two distinctive wavelengths, D for downstream and U for upstream, Figs. 1(b) and (c) show how CCS is configured for downstream and upstream, respectively, for a particular case given in Fig. 1(a) where only one of three ONTs in each splitter is active. Because there are only 3 active ONTs out of 9 and we assume that one OLT can serve up to 3 ONTs, therefore all the active ONTs are commonly connected to OLT1. In Fig. 1(b), a downstream optical signal, D1, from OLT1 is split into three optical switches (SWs) and thus all active ONTs can receive the same OLT1 signal over the same wavelength, D1, regardless of their initially or previously wired connections. In the upstream link, tunable lasers provide required wavelengths for RSOA-based colorless transmitters at the customer sites. By controlling the tunable lasers, we can get all active ONTs to send signals to OLT1 on upstream wavelength, U1. This can be done remotely and dynamically through an out-of-band communication channel between dynamic bandwidth allocation (DBA) modules and the CCS. Fig. 1(c) shows upstream signals from different ONTs are tuned to the same wavelength U1 before they are switched and combined in CCS and finally get connected to OLT1. When the number of active ONTs changes, DBA modules will decide which OLTs remain active, become active, or inactive. When the switching speed is in the order of millisecond, low-loss and low-cost opto-mechanical or MEMSbased switches can be used. The inclusion of the CCS in the current WDM/TDM PON system requires some modification to be made to the MAC layer and setting up a communication channel to the remote node. In order to evaluate the impact of the inserted CCS module on the 10Gb/s link budget, we performed an experiment to measure bit-error-rates (BERs) before and after the module was inserted. An ONT transmitter was connected to an optical attenuator, a 25km SMF, and a CCS module which was emulated with one 1x2 splitter and one 1x2 MEMS optical switch. A pulse pattern generator applied pseudorandom binary sequence (PRBS) with a length of 231-1 to the transmitter. At the receiver, BERs were measured. Fig. 2 shows the results where power penalty is about 0.15 dB, which proves there is negligible performance degradation caused by the CCS module. Fig. 2 BER vs. received optical power 3. Effects of CCS on Cost Effectiveness and Power Consumption In order to quantitatively analyze how the proposed CCS module reduces the cost and improves the power consumption, we consider a typical system in which 16 TDM PON signals are bi-directionally transmitted on 32 wavelengths. Typically, 32 customers are supported by one OLT and thus the maximum system capacity is 512 customers. Moreover, to model customer subscription rates, we assume two different distributions: uniform and Poisson. Uniform distribution means customers subscribe for services in evenly distributed time intervals while in Poisson distribution, customers subscribe in exponentially distributed time intervals. Because the effects of CCS on investment and power saving are strongly related to the number of reduced OLTs and amplifiers, we investigate how OLT number changes with the number of subscribed ONTs. Note that the number of amplifiers in the remote node is twice the number of OLTs. The number of OLTs required for the initial deployment is shown in Fig. 3(a). The conventional system (without a CCS) requires 16 OLTs to be up and running from the start. However, for the system with CCS, new OLTs are added to the system when existing OLTs are out of capacity as more customers subscribe. The OLT number is much less than the conventional system for a small number of subscribed customers, starting from 1 OLT and increasing gradually to 8 OLTs when the number of subscribed customers is 256. Poisson distribution scenario has even less demand for OLTs. The difference between the curves of the two systems represents the number of saved OLTs. Fig. 3(b) shows that the average take-up rates for the system with a CCS are far above the conventional system for a wide range of subscriber numbers and stay above 80% for up to 256 subscribers. This means that the system with CCS has much better utilization of system resource compared to the conventional system. In other word, fewer subscribed customers require a fewer number of OLTs to be installed. The ripples of system with CCS are due to the condition of 32 customers per OLT. Another important parameter, the oversubscription rate, defined as the extra number of connected customers divided by the total number of customers for which the system is designed, tells the level of utilization of system capacity. Fig. 3(c) shows the oversubscription rate of the system with CCS is far higher in case of small subscriber number, indicating more effective utilization of the system capacity. Note that the conventional system is to support up to 512 customers all the time and thus there is no oversubscription at all.

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Average Take-Up Rate

20 Required OLT 15 10 5 CCS (Poisson) 0 0 100 200 300 400 500 Number of subscribed customers Conventional system CCS (Uniform)

100 80 (%) 60 40 20 0 0 100 200 CCS(Uniform)

Oversubscription Rate

(a)

(b)
CCS(Poisson)

(c)
20 15 10 5 0 CCS (Uniform) CCS (Poisson) Conventional system

Conventional system 300 400 500

100

200

300

400

500

Number of subscribed customers

Number of subscribed customers

Fig. 3 (a) Number of OLTs required, (b) Average take-up rate and (c) Oversubscription rate against number of subscribed customers

Per-customer investment is an indicator of capital expenditure. In the initial deployment stage, the conventional system is deployed with a one-off investment regardless of the number of subscribed customers. In contrast, the system with CCS requires much less initial investment as it only needs to install a small set of OLTs and remote node amplifiers based on the initial number of subscribed customers. Therefore the system with CCS is more cost effective. Fig. 4(a) shows normalized per-customer investment results without involving the civil work costs where the components cost data came from existing literatures [5] and manufacturers website. The data points represent the ratio of per customer investment to the total investment of a conventional system. We find that the investment value of the system with CCS is much less than that of the conventional system for a small number of subscribed customers. The impact of CCS cost on the per-customer investment is seen to be minimal for large number of subscribed customers. Fig. 4(b) shows that the cost reduction of the system with CCS can reach up to 60% at low number of active ONTs and is 13% when the number of active ONTs is 256.
Cost Reduction with CCS (%)

Normalized Per-customer

Power Consumption per

Customer (W)

Investment

0.08 0.06 0.04 0.02 0 0

CCS(Poisson) CCS(Uniform)

43 33 23 13 3 -7 0
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CCS(Uniform)

1000
Conventional system

29 19 9 Network with CCS 0 100 200 300 400 500 Number of activ e customers -1

100

10

100 200 300 400 500 Number of subscribed customers

100 200 300 400 Number of subscribed customers

500

Fig. 4 (a) Normalized per customer investment and (b) Cost reduction with CCS (c) Power consumption with CCS

Power consumption has become another key aspect of PON system design. In the operational stage, power consumption depends on the take-up rates (the number of subscribed customers) or the level of traffic demand (the number of active customers) when not all subscribed customers are active. For the conventional system, all OLTs and remote node amplifiers are required to be active all the time regardless of the number of active customers. In contrast, for the system with CCS, only a small set of OLTs and remote node amplifiers are required to be active and can be dynamically managed based on the number of active customers even in a 100% subscribed system. This means that the system with CCS is more power efficient both in a partially subscribed and fully subscribed system. The proof is shown in Fig. 4(c) where the results were obtained based on power consumption data from [6] and manufacturers website. When the number of active customers is small (up to 266), the power consumption per customer for the system with CCS is much lower than that of the conventional system. There is up to 35% reduction in power consumption compared to the conventional system as shown on the right hand side of Fig. 4(c). 4. Conclusion We have proposed a remote channel combine/split module (CCS) to be added to a WDM/TDM PON system to achieve significant reduction in the investment and operational costs under low take-up rates and low traffic demand. Analysis results show up to 60% and 35% reduction is achieved in terms of per-customer investment and power consumption, respectively. We also verified experimentally that the CCS introduces a negligible power penalty to the system performance. The proposed concept has the potential to help achieve a low-cost and low-power consumption WDM/TDM system with gradually phased deployment. 5. References
[1] P. Ossieur, et al, OFC/NFOEC, paper NWB1, 2010. [2] http://www.ftthcouncil.org/. [3] B. Skubic, et al, OFC/NFOEC, paper OTu05, 2010. [4] C.J. Chae, IEEE Photonics Society Annual Meeting, paper WA3, 2010. [5] J. Chen, et al, J. Optical Networking, Vol. 6, No. 5, pp. 514-526, May 2007. [6] J. Baliga, et al, J. Lightwave Technol., Vol. 27, No. 13, pp. 23912403, Jul 2009.

Reduction(%)

0.1

w/o CCS

53

Power Consumption

0.12

(a)

63

(b)

10000

(c)

39