Hardware cost and capacity analysis of future TDM- and WDM-PON access networks

Future generations of PON networks are likely to extend the capabilities of current TDM solutions or apply WDM technology to further increase the exploited optical bandwidth. In this paper we estimate the equipment cost difference between WDM and TDM-PONs, modeling the expected short- and mid-term changes in hardware costs, in order to find the breakeven point of TDM and WDM cost with respect to per user bandwidth. We developed a Pareto access traffic model to take into account the bandwidth gain reachable through statistical multiplexing of the shared bandwidth for TDM solutions. Our results shows that WDM variants are likely to scale better with higher bandwidths, and are expected to outperform TDM-PONs about 600 Mb/s per user speed.