Advanced Architectures for PON Supporting Fi-Wi Convergence

Abstract

The phenomenal growth of mobile backhaul capacity required to support the emerging mobile traffic including cellular Long-Term Evolution (LTE), and LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) requires rapid migration from today's legacy circuit switched T1/E1 wireline and microwave backhaul technologies to a new fiber-supported, all-packet-based mobile backhaul infrastructure. Mobile backhaul, sometimes referred to as the Radio Access Network (RAN), is utilized to backhaul traffic from individual base stations (BSs) to the Radio Network Controller (RNC), which then connects to the mobile operator's core network or gateway. Many carriers around the world are considering the potential of utilizing the fiber-based Passive Optical Network (PON) access infrastructure as an all-packet-based converged fixed-mobile optical access networking transport architecture to backhaul both mobile and typical wireline traffic. This chapter details the case for backhauling wireless traffic utilizing an optical access network, the various standards and technology options for passive optical networks (PONs), as well as the design of a novel, fully distributed, ring-based WDM-PON architecture that could be utilized for the support of a converged next generation mobile infrastructure.