First demonstration of commodity L2 switch-based passive optical network

Abstract

The ‘commoditisation’ (i.e. using commodity hardware or commodity device as a hardware platform for network equipment) and ‘softwarisation’ (i.e. implementing the network function of the target equipment by software) have recently become big trends among communication carriers struggling to balance cost-efficiency and service flexibility. Especially in optical access networks, the concept of the commodity layer 2 (L2) switch-based passive optical network (PON) is attracting attention, but performance demonstrations have not been reported. This Letter offers the first performance demonstration of the L2 switch-based gigabit ethernet PON prototype constructed with an L2 switch and software-based PON-specific functions. The prototype achieves nearly 1 Gbps throughput in one-way transmission. Moreover, an additional numerical analysis confirms that the authors proposed architecture can accommodate sufficient PON port number.