Design and Performance Analysis of Raman Amplified XG-PON System

This paper describes the design considerations and performance analysis for an XG-PON Raman amplification scheme. The experimental results and theoretical calculations presented in this paper demonstrate the feasibility of Raman amplification in O-band access systems; thus, enhancing the performance of existing access installations while still preserving the passive nature of these networks. With the availability of cost-effective quantum dot laser diodes as high-power pumps, Raman amplification is proving to be an attractive candidate for access applications. We experimentally demonstrate that it is possible to achieve a total pump power of 759 mW using polarization multiplexed quantum dot laser diodes (QD-LDs), and using a backward pumping scheme we can support a purely passive XG-PON system with 50 km reach and 64 splits. With system level numerical simulations, we illustrate the use of forward or bi-directional pumping scheme to increase the splits further. We also confirm that the Raman pump output in the experiments, despite being below the single mode cut off for the standard SMF, was efficiently coupled into the trunk fibre using off-the-shelf components. We also show using numerical simulations that a flat gain spectrum can be obtained with less than 0.7 dB gain variation across the XG-PON upstream wavelength band (1260-1280 nm) using a multi-wavelength pumping scheme with just two pump wavelengths. From a detailed system analysis, we discuss the impact of broadband filtering (20 nm) at the receiver adopted by the XG-PON standards, and show that lower class (N1) receivers can be adopted for Raman gains higher than 16 dB.