Optical pulse width modulation based TDM-PON monitoring with asymmetric loop in ONUs

We propose a time division multiplexing passive optical network (TDM-PON) monitoring scheme based on the optical pulse width modulation (OPWM) by using a simple asymmetric loop (AL) located near the optical network unit (ONU). Various pulse widths can be easily obtained by configuring the appropriate length of the patchcord used to generate the path difference between two branches of a 1 × 2 splitter. Different wavelengths can be assigned to the same pulse width, which can further increase the network size. The optimized parameters of the AL are investigated and analysis models are established. The calculation results show that the proposed scheme has smaller correlation distance (CD) and lower multiple-customers interference probability (MCIP) than the periodic coding (PC) scheme. A simplified PON system with 8 ONUs is set up to experimentally demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed scheme. The network recognition processing used to identify the reflected monitoring signals in the proposed scheme is simple, especially compared with the reduced complexity maximum likelihood sequence estimation (RC-MLSE) used in the typical PC scheme.