Design and evaluation of elastic optical access network based on WDM-PON and OFDM technology

The elastic optical network is a novel idea that is targeted at realizing flexible bandwidth allocation according to diverse traffic needs and requirements. Meanwhile, with the increasing demand of data rates in optical access networks, it is urgent to upgrade the current passive optical networks (PONs) through more elastic approaches. In this paper, we propose a kind of elastic optical access network based on wavelength-division multiplexing PON (WDM-PON) and orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) technology, in which finer bandwidth allocation granularity and a flexible wavelength switch are realized. We simulate the transmission performance of the system in both uplinks and downlinks.We also evaluate the elasticity of the system and propose an improved dynamic bandwidth allocation algorithm that has been shown to be the most effective in reducing the blocking rate and bandwidth fragmentation.