Optik 124 (2013) 3678–3681

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Optik
journal homepage: www.elsevier.de/ijleo

2.5 Gb/s hybrid WDM/TDM PON using radio over fiber technique
Abdullah O. Aldhaibani a,∗ , S. Yaakob b , R.Q. Shaddad a , S.M. Idrus a , M.Z. Abdul Kadir b ,
A.B. Mohammad a,b
a
Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor 81310, Malaysia
b
Advanced Physical Technology (APT), Telekom Malaysia (TM) RD Sdn Bhd, Lingkaran Teknokrat Timur, 63000 Cyberjaya, Selangor, Malaysia

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Hybrid gigabit-passive optical network (GPON) is a hybrid passive optical network, where wavelength
Received 6 June 2012 division multiplexing (WDM) GPON and time division multiplexing (TDM)-GPON are integrated into a
Accepted 10 November 2012 single passive optical network, reducing cost and increasing the data rate. In this paper, 2.5 Gb/s GPON
downstream link is presented, using the radio over fiber (RoF) technique in GPON network architecture.
It has been done by means of commercial OptiSystem simulation software, where, differential phase shift
Keywords:
keying (DPSK) modulation is proposed by using 2.4 GHz radio frequency. The propagation of radio signals
Radio over fiber
along a 25 km standard single mode fiber (SMF) investigated. The simulated model can support 32 and
Hybrid WDM/TDM-GPON
EVM
64 users. The analysis was made based on the performance of eye diagram, optical signal to noise ratio
OSNR (OSNR), constellation diagram, error vector magnitude (EVM) and received power.
© 2012 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction The characteristics of GPON technology has been standardized

Huge demand for multimedia data, higher data-speeds, such
as high-definition video and an increasing number of users; are
putting pressure on wireless communication systems vendors to
offer higher data rates. Reducing this pressure could be achieved by
using a microcellular system, which means decreasing the cell size,
and thus, reducing the power consumption of the mobile station [1].
However, the number of base stations will increase and the network
will become very complex. These conditions drive the use of optical
fiber as an efficient medium for radio network backhaul. The RoF
offers a combination of high capacity optical fiber and flexibility
wireless networks. This technology is introduced to reduce infra-
structure cost and the complexity of remote antenna units (RAU).
Moreover, RoF technology is a candidate to enhance the perfor-
mance of wireless communication systems with the combination of
large bandwidth (BW) and low attenuation characteristics offered
by optical fiber [2].
The sharing of infrastructure and equipment between several
base stations (BS) through passive optical network (PON) architec-
ture is emerging as a low cost solution [2,3]. This makes the PONs
over active deployments dominant and reported worldwide, the
GPON standard preferred in America, while Ethernet PON is the
elected standard in Asia, with more than 10 million subscribers in
Japan alone [2,3].
by International Telecommunication Union-T (ITU-T) in Recom-
mendation G.984 series [4]. Combining GPON architecture with
ROF technology has been done in [5], which demonstrates a lower
cost-efficient and attractive solution for the distribution of 3G
BS. Nevertheless, the demands on capacity in access networks is
increasing rapidly due to the huge number of users, making the
distribution of 4th generation (4G) base station good solution in
wireless communication systems such as WiFi and Wimax, with
radio frequency 2.4 GHz.
RoF using analog modulation on gigabit passive optical network
architecture as reported in [6], involved the distribution of eight
BSs by using WDM and splitter, with distance from 10 to 100 km.
The results were good only with 10, 20, and 50 km for BER. Affida
et al. [7], characterized the distribution of IEEE 802.11 WLAN service
using RoF technique in GPON network architecture. Good results
were obtained at the maximum fiber distance of 20 km where
lower BER; and higher OSNR values as those specified as stan-
dards were observed. In addition Martin Bouda et al. have proposed
and demonstrated the cost-effectiveness of a Wavelength-Shared
Hybrid PON architecture which is a low cost solution as a number
of cells increase.
This paper focuses on the downlink part only. It presents the
transmission performance of a downstream link GPON network
with a 2.5 Gb/s bit rate.

2. Radio-over-fiber (RoF) techniques

∗ Corresponding author. RoF presents the distribution of radio frequency (RF) signals
E-mail address: zeed aoa@yahoo.com (A.O. Aldhaibani). over optical fiber links from a central office to RAU. Radio over

0030-4026/$ – see front matter © 2012 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijleo.2012.11.013
 A.O. Aldhaibani et al. / Optik 124 (2013) 3678–3681 3679

fiber-scheme for both down and up-link paths is demonstrated

based on digitized RF-over-fiber technique. The digitized RF-over-
fiber technique is able to improve spectral efficiency and minimize
hardware count, while the performance is limited by inter-channel
interference as a result of spectra aliasing of the regenerated IF
signals which limits the signal-to-noise-ratio [8]. There are many
techniques which are used to transport the RF signal to end-users
such as; RF-over-fiber, intermediate frequency (IF)-over-fiber, and
baseband-(IF)-over-fiber. Where the first two former schemes are Fig. 1. WDM-PONs.
examples of analog photonic links and the last is a digital photonic
link. The RF signal is modulated at the CO in RF band and combined
with continuous wave (CW) laser by Mach–Zehnder Modulator
(MZM), which converts the signal to optical with direct transmis-
sion through the fiber to the BSs. At the BS, the signal is detected
by photo detector (PD); without any need for frequency transla-
tion at the remote BS. RF-over-fiber transport has the advantage
of realizing simple base-station designs with additional benefits
of centralized control, independence of the air-interface and also
enabling multiwireless band operation. However, one of its major
drawbacks is the requirement for high-optical modulation tech- Fig. 2. Hybrid WDM/TDM.
niques that have the ability to generate speed modulated optical
signals as well as high-speed photo detection schemes that directly
one to a power splitter which distributes the signal to four users as
convert the modulated optical signals back to signals in the RF
shown in Fig. 2. Photodiode detects the signal and passes it to DPSK
domain, Using the external modulator, the dispersion effect can be
decoder.
minimized; thus, this is preferred most in any RoF system [9,10].
The hybrid WDM/TDM GPON consists of 32 ONUs, as shown in
Fig. 2. They are separated into WDM groups sharing eight wave-
3. Hybrid structure lengths in a WDM mode. Within each group, four ONUs share one
wavelength in a TDM mode. The TDM-PON downstream traffic is
The need to mitigate complex and costly time-sharing of avail- handled by broadcasts from the OLT to all connected ONUs.
able bandwidth in TDM based PONs has led to the development of
new types of access networks that simplify network operation and 4. Simulation design
handle the ever growing bandwidth requirements. These access
networks are called WDM-PONs, which employ several indepen- This section briefly describes the simulation setup in OptiSystem
dent wavelengths. Each single wavelength can carry data at rates 10.0. All necessary parameters are based on the GPON standardized
of up to electronic processing limits of a few Gbps [11]. PON archi- properties [4]. Fig. 3 shows the hybrid WDM/TDM-PON scheme. In
tecture system includes three important apparatus: optical line the CO, downlink a DPSK signal was generated. The downlink chan-
terminals (OLT), optical network units/optical network terminals nels are multiplexed/demultiplexed by a 1xN multiplexer (MUX)
(ONU/ONT) and optical distribution network (ODN). The transmit- and a demultiplexer (DMUX), respectively. The multiplexed down-
ters at the OLT side generate a single wavelength carrying the data link DPSK signals are sent through the fiber and demultiplexed at
destined for a particular ONU. In OLT the RF signal is modulated receiver, which connects each wavelength to a splitter with a split
by a DPSK sequence generator and combined with CW laser at ratio of 4. Finally, each splitter connects to four BS. Fig. 3 shows the
wavelengths starting from 193.1 THz to 193.8 THz. The frequency schematic diagram of the simulation system, at OLT; the electrical
spacing is 100 GHz which defines the type of elements employed data signal is generated by the pseudo-random bit sequence Gen-
in the network and the cost associated with them. For example, a erator (PRBS), with 2.5 Gbps bit rate. The data is modulated by a
frequency spacing of 100 GHz makes the transmission Dense-WDM differential Phase Shift Keying (8DPSK) sequence generator and an
(DWDM). These wavelengths are then coupled onto a single fiber M-ary pulse generator producing M-ary signal. The M-ary signal is
using WDM Multiplexer, with specific insertion loss, located inside fed into a quadrature modulator (QM) at 2.4 GHz combined with
the CO. The multiplexed output is, in turn, connected to a primary A CW laser diode (LD) at frequency 193.1 THz by Mach–Zehnder
single mode fiber (SMF) of length 25 km which terminates on a Modulator (MZM) to convert the electrical signal to an optical sig-
WDM Demultiplexer as shown in Fig. 1 [12]. nal for transport through a 25 km SMF. At the ONU in receiver, the
The WDM Demultiplexer separates all the wavelengths, accord- signal is detected by a photodiode, and fed to clock recovery in
ing to the way they were combined at the OLT side, and feeds each order to recover the data stream before it is passed to a quadrature

Fig. 3. Schematic diagram downlink hybrid WDM/TDM.

3680 A.O. Aldhaibani et al. / Optik 124 (2013) 3678–3681
Table 1
General parameters.
Parameters Value
Operation frequency 2.4 GHz
Type of modulation DPSK
Bite rate (2.5 Gbps)
Sequence length (256)
Samples per bit (64)
Fiber length 25 km
Reference wavelength 1550 nm
demodulator. In order for the signal to be discovered by a DPSK
sequence decoder and pulsed by RZ pulse generator to get the
binary signal, the QM is connected to an M-ary threshold detec-
tor; to quantize the signal based on a suitable value of threshold
amplitudes. The constellation of signal is display by constellation
visualizer. Eye diagram tools are added to plot the M-ary signal at
the quadrature modulator output of receiver, which consist of PRBS
generator, RZ generator and eye diagram Analyzer.
5. Result and discussion
Hybrid WDM/TDM model has been successfully simulated and
analyzed by a commercial optical system simulator, OptiSystem.
The model has been constructed by following the general parame-
ters in Table 1.
A convenient way to measure the performance of the system is
by using an eye diagram for this simulation, with reference to Fig. 4,
the eye opening is clearly indicating that the system performance
is good.
A constellation diagram is a representation of a signal modu-
lated by a digital modulation scheme such as quadrature amplitude
modulation or differential phase-shift keying. In this simulation, we
use differential phase-shift keying (8DPSK) signal which uses 8 bits
per symbol. The number of bits in each symbol is 3, and the constel-
lation result is given by formula 2n . The signal constellation of the
transmitter is taken from the output of M-ary pulse generator as
illustrated in Fig. 5(a). The received signal at the receiver is shown
Fig. 4. The eye diagram at the receiver of the first ONU.
Fig. 5. The constellation of the electrical signal at the (a) transmitter and (b) receiver.
Fig. 6. OSNR performance based on data rate and length of fiber.
in Fig. 5(b). It can be clearly seen that the constellation of the output
signal is similar to the input signal with some amplitude and phase
errors which will be measured by the EVM.
The OSNR performance for the varied fiber length and data rates
is shown in Fig. 6. It can be seen that the OSNR at 0.1 nm bandwidth
displays a decreasing pattern along the length of the fiber. In cer-
tain optical systems, the maximum value of OSNR, for 2.5 Gbps is
40 dB and the minimum is 35.2 dB; for 1.25 Gbps the maximum
value of OSNR is 41.7 dB and minimum value is 36 dB, while the
maximum value for OSNR at 1Gbps is 44 dB and minimum value
is 37.6 dB. As shown graphically in Fig. 6, the OSNR is greater over
small distances and is reduced over large distances. The OSNR is
also reduced fractionally while the data rate increased because of
increased noise.
Fig. 7 illustrates the received optical versus the fiber length. The
power is found to be reduced linearly with increasing fiber length
due to attenuation. The optical power at the transmitter is 0 dBm. It
can be seen from Fig. 7, that, the received optical power is −19 dBm
along 25 km fiber, which means we can increase the number of
wavelengths for each splitter to eight or extend the length of fiber.
The power is reduced due to attenuation, dispersion, and losses
which are contributed to by all devices of the network builder.
The EVM is defined as the root-mean-square value of the differ-
ence between a collection of the measured and the ideal symbols.
The difference is normalized by the average power per symbol in
the constellation. The values of EVM vary according to type of mod-
ulation used, such as QPSK, 16 QAM, etc. [14,15]. The following
equation is used to calculate the EVM [13]:
 N (1/2)
(1/N) |S
r−1 ideal,r
− Smeas,r |2
EVM RMS = N (1)
(1/N) r−1
|Sideal,r |2
Fig. 8 displays the EVM of the downlink signals versus the fiber
length. The results show that the EVM increase a little bit as length
of fiber increases. The same figure shows that the EVM is increased
when data rate increases. Where at 50 km it is 26%, 27%, and 30.3%
for 1, 1.25, and 2.5 Gbps, respectively.
Fig. 9 shows the EVM increases to −10.3 dB as the receive power
reduces to −24 dBm [16]. It can be clearly observed from Fig. 10 that
when OSNR is increased, the EVM value is reduced.
Fig. 7. The received optical power at the receiver versus the length of fiber.
 A.O. Aldhaibani et al. / Optik 124 (2013) 3678–3681
Fig. 8. EVM versus fiber length (downlink).
Fig. 9. EVM of different receives powers.
Fig. 10. The EVM versus OSNR.
6. Conclusion
The hybrid WDM/TDM GPON using radio over fiber technique
has been introduced and analyzed. The 2.5 Gb/s hybrid GPON with
RoF with digital modulation (8DPSK) is implemented. The simula-
tion results show that the Hybrid WDM/TDM GPON with 2.5 Gbps,
8DPSK and 2.4 GHz, gives a good performance for 32–64 users over
25 km fiber length. The value of EVM is increased as the distance
increases, reaching to 30.3% at 50 km. In contrast, the OSNR is
reduced to 35 dBm as the distance is increased to 50 km. Good OSNR
3681
and power budget have been calculated for the proposed PON. The
OSNR is reduced while the number of wavelengths increased as a
result of channel interference. Power receiver reduced to −24 dBm
at 50 km fiber length. The results show that the Hybrid WDM/TDM
GPON offers a promising solution for today’s communication to
support the continuous increase in the number of wireless Internet
users and demands on bandwidth.
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