Short Courses

*This course has been cancelled* 

This course will review Passive Optical Networks (PON) from various perspectives, such as their rationale for use, the technology utilized, the deployment of the network, and their commercial applications. This networking topology has become the most widespread optical access system. This happened for very good practical (ease of use), economic (profitability), and regulatory (balancing open access versus economies of scale) reasons which will be explained.

Over time, several generations of several different technologies have been researched and developed. The evolution in terms of speed has extended from 50 Mb/s up to 50 Gb/s, and may continue into the future. Examples of the major categories include TDM, WDM, TWDM, and SCM PONs. These will be reviewed in terms of their key differences and design choices. Important technology ‘break points’ will be especially highlighted. The influence of various standards groups will be explained.

As with most networks, the physical deployment of PON consumes a lot of time and money. The end-to-end process of PON system deployment will be explained. This includes the business, technical selection, site selection, physical design, deployment, and maintenance. Modern optimization methods will be presented. Lastly, the many applications for PON will be reviewed. This includes fiber to the home, FTTbusiness, FTTwireless, FTTindustry, FTTroom, and others.  Each of these has unique requirements on the PON, and how the PON supports these will be analyzed. 

This course should enable participants to:

· Explain why PON is the dominant optical access system, and why it is likely to remain so for many years.

· Compare the various PON technologies in technical and practical terms, and in the context of their historical development .

· Design deployable PON networks from economic, technical, and practical perspectives, to enable successful network implementations.

· Determine the best type of PON for the desired set of applications, considering the costs and benefits of candidate systems.

· Diagram the typical data flows between each network element, and between functional blocks inside the elements.

· Describe the key advances in the capability and complexity of PON technology, to delineate the various generations of systems.

· Test and Measure PON systems to identify and locate network faults and to monitor performance.

Engineers and scientists from academia, equipment vendors, and network operators with an interest in access networks are the major audience for this course. Knowledge of the fundamentals of optical communications and a working understanding of how networks and equipment are constructed is assumed. 

Dr. Effenberger has worked in the optical access field at Bellcore, Quantum Bridge Communications (Motorola), and Futurewei Technologies, where he is now the Fellow for fixed access network technology.  His team works on forward-looking fiber access technologies, with several “world’s first” prototypes and trials.  Frank is the rapporteur for ITU-T Q2/15, vice chair of ETSI F5G ISG, is a Fellow of the OSA and the IEEE, and holds 130 US patents.