Design of AWG-based WDM-PON architecture with multicast capability

Recently, the triple play service (TPS) has been considered to be a promising business model or application. Thus, the capability for multicast transmission has become a very important requirement for access networks. However, unlike existing passive optical networks (PONs), the arrayed-waveguide grating (AWG) based wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM)-PON does not have multicast capability because it is a P2P network for the downstream direction, from optical line terminal (OLT) to optical network units (ONUs). In this paper, AWG- based WDM-PON architecture with multicast capability is proposed. It provides high scalability and single copy broadcast (SCB) capability by employing multi-stage AWGs at a remote node (RN) and a multi-wavelength converter (MWC) at OLT. The performance of the proposed architecture is evaluated in terms of cost, scalability, link capacity and bandwidth per user, in both upstream and downstream directions, by comparison with other multicasting architectures.