Design of a multi-operator optical access network on advanced PON solutions

Over the past 10 years, it has been evident that the pace of life moves around multimedia contents. These, either by necessity or convenience, are not always found in close proximity to users but is essential to have access to them as soon as possible. That is why connectivity has become a staple for people and for business, since all the processes with which we live, from the simplest daily life, to the most complex for productivity in the companies, are now heavily influenced by gadgets and applications. The behavior of people in these processes has also evolved. For example, the programmers are thinking people terminals to be just a portal to access remote applications and we are not talking anymore about mere consumers of content, but of "prosumers", thus, has changed the relationship between people and traditional services (like telephone, TV, radio and postal). All this has led to the opening of new markets with thousands of possibilities for users and the onset of trends that are consolidated or discarded according to the impact they cause with their value-added services. To meet the foregoing, operators have had to make large investments in developing all kinds of networks. The result has been a widespread access to high speed Internet and the deployment of more and more modern infrastructure. In this thesis work, the access networks will be presented from the point of view of multiple operators, because the most common situation for any network access is that the operators share some infrastructure rather than deploying it completely on their own. The recent advances in electronics and especially in photonics, have made possible the development of new transmission technologies, allowing also the realization of networks with the capacity to support the services for which they were designed. Thinking about medium to long term, all these innovations will be supported by new generation networks, which means a gradual migration towards them in terms of infrastructure and technology. So far, all the IEEE and ITU-T standards about access networks, describe their general characteristics and their operation in the case of a single operator. The migration process towards NGN must also be based on standards that are to be defined and will surely include recommendations on how should be the interaction of various operators through the different layers of the network. The thesis will cover issues such as the status of access networks taking as reference the situation in Italy, we will review the standards that define the characteristics of these networks and we will have a case study to evaluate the performance of the several alternatives (architectures) that the ROAD-NGN project have proposed for unbundling in passive optical networks (PON). Our work also includes the development of a software which can perform calculations to facilitate part of the design of an access in case of multiple operators.