VCSEL wavelength reuse for intrinsically bidirectional data traffics in next generation GPONs

Abstract:

An all-optical wavelength reuse technique employing cost effective power efficient vertical surface emitting laser (VCSEL) is proposed to address uplink data streaming from end-users by exploiting the same wavelength assigned to them. A saturated optical erbium-doped optical fiber amplifier (EDFA) is adopted to erase a directly modulated 10 Gbit/s data from an incoming downstream wavelength. We show that with EDFA saturation, the extinction ration of the incoming wavelength is reduced to less than 1 dBm, therefore allowing for wavelength re-modulation. A receiver sensitivity of −19.65 dBm and −17.86 dBm is attained for downstream and upstream data signals respectively. A total of 24.7 km single mode fibre transmission is attained experimentally. This technique opens new perspectives towards development of efficient spectrum utilization for application in wavelength flexible optical networks with non-static flex-spectrum grids.