A secure WDM ring access network employing silicon micro-ring based remote node

•A novel, secure and scalable WDM ring-based access network is experimentally demonstrated.•Wavelength hopping for specific ONU is deployed by using silicon micro-ring resonators.•Using silicon-based devices could be cost-effective for the cost-sensitive access network.

A secure and scalable wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) ring-based access network is proposed and demonstrated using proof-of-concept experiments. In the remote node (RN), wavelength hopping for specific optical networking unit (ONU) is deployed by using silicon micro-ring resonators (SMR). Using silicon-based devices could be cost-effective for the cost-sensitive access network. Hence the optical physical layer security is introduced. The issues of denial of service (DOS) attacks, eavesdropping and masquerading can be made more difficult in the proposed WDM ring-based access network. Besides, the SMRs with different dropped wavelengths can be cascaded, such that the signals pass through the preceding SMRs can be dropped by a succeeding SMR. This can increase the scalability of the RN for supporting more ONUs for future upgrade. Here, error-free 10 Gb/s downlink and 1.25 Gb/s uplink transmission are demonstrated to show the feasibility of the proposed network.