A dynamic wavelength resource allocation capable passive optical network with shared transceivers

The paper proposes a new PON architecture that applies an optical broadcast capable router (OBR) to route a wavelength to a set of selected PON branches and thus enables the transceivers in the central office (CO) to be shared among them. The OBR is built on fiber splitters and switching gates, and by controlling the gates the wavelengths at the inputs can reach any outputs of the OBR. Logical PONs are dynamically configured based on users' changing traffic patterns, and the traffic is further scheduled in the time domain in the logical PONs. The network achieves network resource sharing without requiring tunable transceivers or wavelength filters, and furthermore without changing deployed network devices in the field or at the user end. Experiment study and analysis results demonstrate the concept of resource sharing among PON branches and show the efficiency of resource sharing.