An ATM PON system overlaid with a 155-Mb/s optical star network for customer networking and fiber to the premises

We propose a method to implement a 155-Mb/s optical star network using existing passive optical network (PON) cable plant and demonstrate its feasibility experimentally. The light-emitting diode- (LED) based optical star network, wavelength-compatible with the asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) PON system, showed a power penalty of 1.1 dB compared to back-to-back connection. The overlay network had little effect on ATM PON signals.