Experimental demonstration of an improved EPON architecture using OFDMA for bandwidth scalable LAN emulation

We propose and demonstrate an improved Ethernet passive optical network (EPON) architecture supporting bandwidth-scalable physical layer local area network (LAN) emulation. Due to the use of orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) technology for the LAN traffic transmission, there is no need to change the existing EPON architecture. Only one receiver at each optical network unit (ONU) is required to detect both LAN traffic and EPON downstream traffic, which makes the proposed system simple and cost-effective. Moreover, flexible assignment of LAN traffic bandwidth is realized by allocating different number of subcarriers or using different modulation formats. The 250 Mb/s 4-quadrature amplitude modulation (4-QAM) and 500 Mb/s 16-QAM OFDM LAN traffic are successfully emulated with the EPON traffic in our experiment.