By Venk Mutalik, Marcel Schemmann, Ayham Al-Bana, Zoran Maricevic, ARRIS Group
In an RFoG environment, where many of the physical limitations of the HFC cable plant do not exist, DOCSIS 3.1 could achieve significantly more capacity. A well thoughtout partnership of DOCSIS 3.1 and RFoG can satisfy the anticipated growth in traffic demand while providing MSOs with plant and equipment investment protection well into the future.
As MSOs consider an HFC split change or if moving from HFC to FTTH, it is important for the upgraded plant to have a life of at least a decade or more. To support the bandwidth requirements of a service group of around 100 subscribers, between 10 and 100 Gbps downstream capacity and of several Gbps upstream capacity is likely to be needed.
It is shown in this paper that plain NRZ binary modulation formats cannot meet the above demand in the presence of high fiber dispersion. In this paper, we show a path to a much more efficient use of the RF spectrum, which when used with RFoG technology and features available via the DOCSIS 3.1 standard - and combined with innovative low cost ONU designs using current technology - addresses the anticipated growth rates and bandwidth expansions seamlessly over the next decade and more.