Discussion On The Integration Of EPON And GPON Systems

In recent years, FTTX has developed rapidly in China. Most of the current global FTTx customers are located in the Asia-Pacific region, including China, Japan, and Korea. There are two major FTTX technologies, EPON and GPON. Both technologies have advantages and disadvantages respectively. EPON was standardized earlier than GPON. EPON is more mature and more deployed in industris.GPON has a more complete frame structure, a set of well defined OAM functions and a higher transmission efficiency.Either of these technologies can support full-service access including voice, data, video,etc.In order to avoid the risk of technology choice, telecommunication operators hope the vendor can provide a common platform which can be used as EPON or GPON freely. Therefore, these two technologies should be integrated.At present, the main ideas to integrate EPON and GPON technologies are OLT back-plane integration and so called full-service integration. This paper will discuss further integration idea based on these two integration technologies.Chapter 1 describes the development of EPON and GPON technologies, the situation and integration needs of these two technologies. Chapter 2 describes the principle of PON system. Chapter 3 describes the characteristics of the EPON technology and EPON network protection. Chapter 4 describes the GPON features, technical principles, network protection, and applications. Chapter 5 compares EPON to GPON technologies in terms of industrialization, standardization and technical specification. An integration idea for these two technologies is introduced and real product examples from Fiberhome and Huawei are discussed. Two new integration ways are proposed. First one is that take the EPON module as the protection of GPON module in the integration platform of EPON and GPON; The second is that the optical splitter will be placed closer to the ONU side, so that the whole system will be more flexible to meet the diverse needs of end users. Chapter 6 discisses the evolution of PON technologies and summarizes the paper.