Abstract

The anticipated demand for broadband switched services and recent component improvements have revitalized research activities in fiber-in-the-loop WDM passive optical networks (PON). Early WDM PON proposals [1, 2] promised high performance at a relatively high price, due to the large number of expensive active optical components. Some recently demonstrated broadband WDM passive optical networks [3, 4] based on the waveguide-grating router (WGR) [5] offer virtual point-to-point connectivity, are easily upgraded, and yet may be relatively inexpensive since expensive components (such as the central office transmitter and the router at the remote node) are shared among all users. While these WDM PONs are well suited to the delivery of bi-directional switched services, the wavelength-dependent routing property of the remote node complicates the delivery of broadcast services such as video [6]. Broadcast operation in a router-based network can be implemented, however, by using a simple broadband optical transmitter such as an uncooled LED [7, 8]. We demonstrate a PON architecture which provides a 1.3-μιη downstream broadcast digital video upgrade for WGR-based WDM PONs.

© 1996 Optical Society of America