By Zhensheng (Steve) Jia, Ph.D., CableLabs; Haipeng Zhang, Ph.D., CableLabs; L. Alberto Campos, Ph.D., CableLabs
The modern world heavily depends on the swift and dependable sharing of information. The growing need for faster data speeds and greater network capacity consistently surpasses the capabilities of existing systems [1, 2]. Passive optical networks (PONs) have experienced significant advancements in the last twenty years and are now considered highly appealing as access network solutions for providing high-speed data and video services [3, 4]. A PON is an economical and efficient optical communication network technology that uses fiber optics to deliver various broadband services to users. PON architecture adopts a point-to-multipoint (P2MP) structure and employs passive optical components to establish connections between service providers and customers. Passive fiber optic splitters play a crucial role in PON architecture as they divide the signal in a way that each port receives the same data signal, although depending on the splitter design, different ports may have varying power levels. To meet the increasing bandwidth demand driven by data intensive applications such as video streaming, 5G mobile Internet, and cloud networking, several generations of PON systems have been standardized through the efforts of two major organizations: the International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) and the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet Working Group, as shown in Figure 1.