Wavelength reused bidirectional reflective coherent-PON based on cascaded SOA/RSOA ONUs.

Highlights • Wavelength reuse based bidirectional coherent OFDMA access network. • Enhancement of spectral efficiency by using the proposed reflective coherent PON. • Verification of the proposed technique in future WDM-PON. Abstract This paper demonstrates wavelength reused bidirectional transmission for a reflective coherent passive optical network (R-Co-PON). By reusing the downstream optical signal as the upstream optical carrier, the proposed R-Co-PON enhances the optical spectral efficiency. In an experimental demonstration, the proposed R-Co-PON achieved a symmetrical bidirectional transmission rate of 12 Gb/s using a 73-km-long fiber loopback architecture. The experiments confirmed the potential applicability of the proposed system in future optical access networks, particularly those using wavelength-division multiplexing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]