Cost-effective 2.5 Gb/s bidirectional WDM PON using single optical source at the central office

Nowadays, the bandwidth demand of the telecommunication network is growing rapidly due to the increasing number of technology-intelligent users. Optical broadband access networks have emerged to address two issues: (1) channel capacity sharing fairly to the customers, and (2) adequate capacity assignment according to service requirements. The wavelength division multiplexing passive optical network (WDM PON) is a promising solution to provide high data rate, excellent scalability, good protocol transparency and easy upgradability. In this paper, a cost-effective bidirectional WDM PON is proposed to provide symmetrical 2.5 Gb/s by using just single optical laser diode (LD) at the central office (CO). The optical frequency upconversion (OFU) technique is used to implement the proposed network. At the optical network unit (ONU), the reflective semiconductor optical amplifier (RSOA) reuses and amplifies the downlink wavelength to modulate the upstream data. The bit error rate (BER) performace and eye diagrams of the designed system are investigated.