Field trial with a FTTH/PON monitoring technique based on unique wavelength-selective-mirror combinations [invited]

Passive optical network (PON) monitoring with as many as 1024 subscribers encounters difficulties due to high splitting losses and drop fiber differentiation problems. In this work a novel concept for monitoring PONs for fiber to the home (FTTH) access, which is based on concatenated wavelength-selective mirrors, has been investigated in a field trial. At each subscriber a unique mirror combinationis installed. Binomial coefficients guarantee that each mirror combination in a given PON is used only once. The field trial has been performed successfully with a PON consisting of 37 km deployed standard singlemode fiber and up to 1:32 passive optical power splitting causing a total one-way attenuation of at least 30.7 dB. Different subscribers located at equal distances from the optical time domain reflectometry could be distinguished and identified individually. For the measurement setup only low-cost components were used.