Planning and Cost Optimization of Balanced Passive Optical Networks with Cascaded Splitters

Passive Optical Networks support efficient delivery of high-speed bandwidth demands to end users. To make PON future-ready for upcoming bandwidth surge brought in by 6G technologies and related use cases, studies for techno-economic issues has to be addressed now.
In PON architecture, the aggregated traffic starts from the Optical Line Terminal (OLT) and moves in downstream via Optical Distribution Network (ODN) towards the Optical Network Units (ONU) connected with end users’ equipment.
In Balanced PON (BPON), ODN distributes the optical light equally among all the distribution fibers, and is primarily used in dense urban scenario.
In this work, focus will be on comparison of the BPON architecture with one versus two remote nodes levels as shown in the figure. The combined optical losses, and techno-economic cost considerations will also be taken into account.