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Today, the bottleneck for residential fast Internet communication and other broadband services lies in the access network, the last drop of cabling or wireless infrastructure connecting the individual subscribers with the network. Amongst the innovative access networks that are being deployed worldwide, the Passive Optical Network (PON) is one of the most promising technologies. Besides the high data capacity and strong immunity from the electronical interference proper to fibre, one of the big advantages of the PON system is that all active components between access node and the customer premises are eliminated, effectively creating a transparent glass pipe with a long projected lifetime and an enormous bandwidth capability. The Gigabit PON (GPON) is one of the most advanced PON protocols, offering multiple-service support with the richest possible set of Operation, Administration and Maintenance (OAM) features. This research includes two topics, the design and validation of a high-speed embedded control platform containing hardware and software and the study of channel coding in the upstream to improve the performance of the burst-mode GPON uplink physical layer.

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Zhe Lou, Ph.D in Electronic Engineering from the University Ghent. Senior Research Engineer at Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent, Antwerp, Belgium. Member of Alcatel-Lucent Technical Academy (ALTA).

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