Integrated Wireless-pon access Network Architectures Milos Milosavljevic

Chapter 8 Project Achievements and Future Work 
152 
This thesis has commenced by providing a justification as to why PONs have accomplished 
recognition from incumbents as a cost effective solution to form the basis for developing 
broadband access networks [1, 2] with subscriber bandwidths reaching more than 100 Mbit/s in 
the near future [3]. Owing to varying requirements and business plans of network operators and 
governments, Asia and North America constitute the worldwide leaders in the deployment of 
TDM-PON infrastructures, compared to Europe that although has developed plans for vast 
deployment in the coming years has only accommodated so far only a few fibre deployment 
projects as a result of the regulatory environment uncertainties. On the other extreme, South 
Korea has adopted primarily WDM-PON architectures to provide subscribers high dedicated 
bandwidth although the WDM-PON has not been yet standardised [2]. Elsewhere, WDM-PONs 
are currently not the preferable solution from the operators point of few since AWGs reduce 
network flexibility while providing for low resource utilisation per wavelength.
To allow higher bandwidth, greater coverage and penetration than the currently deployed 
standards, various potential research paths for building next-generation PONs have been 
undertaken, with a common aim to support new bandwidth-hungry online services and further 
reduce the cost for delivering the existing ones [4]. These initiatives include the increase of 
PON aggregate data rates to 10 Gbit/s [5-9] complemented by extending their physical reach 
and split to distances of at least 100 km [10, 11], offering economical bandwidth and service 
upgrade from the end-user all the way up to the core network at significantly reduced cost for 
network operators. An alternate path, aspects of which have very recently been standardised 
[12], considers multiple wavelength operation over standard splitter PONs to allow 2-D 
allocation of network resources and a smooth migration for the future.
In addition, broadband wireless standards have evolved from traditionally voice-based mobile 
networks to data-centric networks allowing hundreds of Mbits/s and large number of users 

---