FDMA in Point-to-Multipoint Fibre Access Systems for Non-Residential Applications

Optical access networks are seeing growing applications for use cases beyond residential, for example in campus and as Industry 4.0 intra-factory networks, which introduce different requirements in terms of bandwidth delivery and latency. We present an uplink access system with simultaneous transmission and detection of several users by means of frequency division multiplexing (FDM). We demonstrate a multiple uplink access system with differential binary phase shift keying (DBPSK) signals and coherent detection that targets a low and deterministic latency. We achieve receiver (Rx) sensitivities of -43.5dBm, -40dBm, and -34dBm at a pre forward error correction (FEC) bit error ratio (BER) of 10 -3 at 2.5 GBaud, 5 GBaud, and 8 GBaud respectively after 20km of fibre with coherent detection. Furthermore, we show the possibility of employing time-division multiplexing (TDM) within the frequency bands. We also present real-time services showing that the system can allow latency-sensitive and best-effort applications to share the network.