Recent progress in WDM passive optical networks

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Recently, FTTH has finally emerged from the R&D stage and became a commercial reality. For example, in Japan, it has been reported that the total number of FTTH subscribers exceeded 1.5 million in 2004. In US, there have been numerous announcements of FTTH deployments by both operating companies and municipalities. It appears that this trend is rapidly spreading all over the world. At present, most of the FTTH deployments utilize TDM PON (such as GPON and EPON). However, WDM PON is beginning to attract significant attention, as Korea started a large-scale field traial this year. In fact, WDM PON has long been considered as an ultimate solution for the access networks due to its large capacity, easy management, network security, and upgradeability. In this paper, we review the current issues in WDM PON and report the relevant technical progresses achieved at KAIST. The subjects to be covered include low-cost WDM light sources (such as spectrum-sliced incoherent light sources and ASE-injected Fabry-Perot lasers), techniques for the delivery of broadcast services in WDM PON, wavelength-tracking technique for the wavelength-selective devices placed at the un-powered remote node, survivable WDM PON architectures, and fault monitoring and localization techniques.