Metropolitan area networks and access networks

Our modern society is becoming ever more dependent on broadband telecommunication services. Fast internet, multimedia on-line gaming, high quality video and audio, and high speed peer-to-peer file transfer, together with the need to be always-on-line and personalized service delivery, are significant drivers for the growing bandwidth demand at the customer residences. Also businesses are heavily relying on high-speed and reliable broadband connections. Thus the traffic loads in metro and access networks keep rising, asking for powerful and versatile yet cost-efficient communication infrastructures. Optical fibre techniques are excellently suited to meet these demands. They can provide circuit- as well as packet-switched services, at various quality-of-service levels, while improving on cost efficiency in installation, maintenance and operation. In the metro part, multi-wavelength routing techniques can provide ample capacity. In access, the increasing number of Fibre-to-the-Home installations is fulfilling broadband demands, next to hybrid network solutions where fibre is feeding the last copper-based or wireless link to the end user. This short course will address optical network solutions for metro and access including their key optical components and cost aspects. It will treat techniques for circuit-switching and packet-routing, network protection and reconfiguration, multiple-access shared-fibre network techniques (time-slotted ones such as BPON, GPON, EPON; wavelength-slotted WDM-PON; frequency-slotted SCM-PON), hybrid access network solutions such as fibre-coax, fibre-wireless using radio-over-fibre techniques, and free-space optics links. Also short-range network solutions using multimode silica or polymer optical fibres will be discussed, which cost-effectively introduce optical networks even into the home.