Colorless amplified WDM-PON employing broadband light source seeded optical sources and channel-by-channel dispersion compensators for >100 km reach

We have demonstrated an amplified wavelength-division multiplexed (WDM) passive optical network (PON) by using broadband light source (BLS) seeded optical sources and chirped fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) based dispersion compensators. Chirped FBGs located at central office (CO) were fabricated and used as channel-by-channel dispersion compensators in order to mitigate the dispersion-induced distortion of both downstream and upstream signals. Owing to a low insertion loss of chirped FBG based dispersion compensator, the optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) of the downstream signal could be improved to be ∼28 dB. Thus, we re-confirmed that an error-free transmission of 1.25 Gb/s signals over a 100 km single-mode fiber (SMF) link could be achieved with a proposed amplified WDM-PON architecture. We have also evaluated the impact of various noises on the system’s performance, and found that the low OSNR of the downstream signal would be a main limiting factor on the maximum reach of the proposed amplified WDM-PON architecture. From the measured ∼13 dB improvement in OSNR of the downstream signal compared to our previously-proposed dispersion compensating module based scheme, we believe that the proposed architecture can accommodate a reach of longer than 100 km SMF link easily.