An optical surveillance technique based on cavity mode analysis of SL-RSOA for GPON

An optical in-service surveillance technique based on cavity mode analysis of self-injection locked reflective semiconductor optical amplifier (SL-RSOA) for gigabit-capable passive optical network (GPON) is proposed. At each optical network unit (ONU), an upstream transmitter utilizing SL-RSOA can generate both upstream data signal and surveillance signal due to presence of external cavity. We can able to detect both upstream data and surveillance signals from all ONUs simultaneously at the optical line terminal (OLT) by assigning a distinct cavity mode frequency to each upstream transmitter. We also estimate the power penalty induced by the surveillance signals on the upstream data channel during simultaneous detection mechanism. Further, we propose an alternative method to detect the surveillance signals by allocating a separate monitoring time slot in upstream GPON transmission convergence (GTC) frame so as to reduce the influence of surveillance signals on the upstream data channel.