Technical Background:

The entire landscape of current telecommunication networks is changing. Many of the large carriers are spending large amounts of money to restructure their networks, and introduce new services. The use and demand of broadband services for things like IPTV,video on demand, interactive gaming and video conferencing has led to an increase in internet protocol (IP) data traffic and put pressure on carriers to upgrade their networks. Deployment of fiber optics is extending from the backbone to the wide-area network (WAN) and the metropolitan-area network (MAN) and will soon penetrate into the local loop. This includes advanced technologies such as dense wavelength division multiplexing, optical amplification, optical path routing, wavelength add drop multiplexer, and high speed switching. All these factors seem to point to an eventual widespread adoption of a new optical IP Ethernet architecture which combines the state of the art in fiber optics and Ethernet technologies. This is predicted to serve the needs of the customers for now and for plenty of time to come.

Market Landscape:

PON today is present in commercial deployments with over 3 million lines deployed. Since the IEEE 802.3ah standard was approved, both equipment cost and optics cost has decreased by more than 50%. EPON equipment has a very broad manufacturing base also. The natural target for faster EPON is Asia -- particularly Japan, where EPON has taken hold. Last year Japanese carriers were mulling a switch to GPON and also considering the faster EPON grades coming up. U.S started with some E-PON deployments and pilot projects as long as some big companies and start-up are strongly betting in this technology. Otherwise Europe seems to wait for high speed services demand, delaying the investments on cabling and using the existing infrastructure as long as possible. This trend could change only if the fiber optic network infrastructure cost decreases. T That comes possible not only by reducing the number of active opto-electronic components into the network (that is the main reason of PONS) but also by improving the network deployment sharing efficiency, guaranteeing pay-as-you-grow upgrades and growing the number of subscribers that share an expensive network node.

Our Project:

This projects aims to design and develop a new generation of Ethernet PON-based devices that optimize the bandwidth usage as the installation costs. Our devices are compact FPGA-based, SOPC reconfigurable digital logic modules enclosing WDM technology to enhance the bandwidth available per node. Furthermore their modular and reconfigurable architecture allows scalable network design and in-field system upgrade. Additionally they include hardware bandwidth accelerators and propose some remote monitor and maintenance facilities.