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Abstract:
Local access network technologies tend to take advantage of the potentially huge capabilities of fiber communication to deliver faster and more various services to end users. There has been considerable research effort in implementing access networks optically. These optical access technologies were developed particularly under certain circumstances, each of which has its own application domain. This paper reviews critically the existing optical technologies in terms of advantages and limitations. The intention of implementing optical access network also reveals some critical challenges. Through a case study, the paper analyzes the feasibility of designing an optical access network that avoids the common challenges and limitations in the optical field, hence concludes that the key issue when designing an optical access control protocol is the good utilization of the available bandwidth with simplicity of implementation.
Keywords: Optical Networking, Access Networks
1. Introduction
Optical networks have been developing for many years. Fibers used to merely function as a dumb optical layer transporting optical signals. As the layered network architecture has developed, the optical transport network tends to support a wider variety of functionalities. The trend of the optical transport network development is to provide an intelligent platform to support various types of services. The flexibility can be provided by the introduction of optical packet switching (OPS) which enables highlyreconfigurable, efficient and low cost data transmission [1, 2].
Nowadays, local access network technologies also tend to take advantage of the potentially huge capabilities of fiber communication to deliver faster and more various services to end users. Considerable research effort has been put in implementing access networks optically. There have been some productive cases such as Hybrid Fiber-Coax (HFC), Optical Ethernet (OE), Radio over Fiber (RoF), and Passive Optical Networks (PON), of all which will be reviewed in this paper. These technologies were developed under certain circumstances; each of them has their own benefits and limitations.
In terms of network design and deployment of optical access networks there are many restrictions and challenges that have to be faced despite so many appealing features of the optical fibers. As an advanced networking concept, optical access network still has lots of technical aspects which need to be explored and improved. With the restrictions of the available optical devices, the design...