Symmetric 10Â Gb/s wavelength reused bidirectional RSOA based WDM-PON with DPSK modulated downstream and OFDM modulated upstream signals

A 10 Gb/s bidirectional wavelength division multiplexing passive optical network (WDM-PON) with reflective semiconductor optical amplifier (RSOA) based colorless optical network unit (ONU) is proposed and analyzed for next generation gigabit class optical access network. Differential phase shift keying (DPSK) modulated signal is used in downstream and further reused as a seeding wavelength for upstream data modulation. By exploiting the constant envelope property of DPSK seed signal, the re-modulation noise in upstream receiver is effectively minimized without employing any constraint on extinction ratio of downstream signal. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signal is used in upstream transmission to overcome the limited bandwidth (∼1 GHz) response of RSOA remodulation. The results show that the proposed 10 Gb/s symmetric WDM-PON can achieve good performance over 25 km fiber transmission with error free operation in downstream and bit error rate (BER) lower than forward error correction (FEC) limit in upstream.