All-optical VPN in optical OFDMA-based PON for integration of optical and wireless networks (Invited)

Recently, the optical orthogonal frequency division multiple access-based passive optical network (OFDMA-PON) is an attractive subject that many researchers focus on. All-optical virtual private network (VPN) provides dedicated optical channels to connect VPN users, can not only achieve a high throughput and low latency, but also provide enhanced security at the physical layer for users. We report a novel architecture enabling both all-optical VPN and all-optical optical network units (ONU) communications simultaneously, which can be applied to integration of optical and wireless networks. In this scheme, we isolate the conventional traffic, the VPN traffic and the ONU traffic by OFDM sub-carrier bands allocation. Due to the dynamical allocation of sub-carriers, the VPN in OFDMA-PON has a great scalability. And the traffics are transmitted through the dedicated optical channel and routed to the destined ONU by optical distribution network (OND). We also consider the VPN and inter-ONU communications in two different situations: among different ONU in the same group and among different ONU in different groups. In the second situation, the system can cover a wider area and can support more users. Finally, we demonstrate the VPN and inter-ONU communication functions with 10 Gbit/s, 16 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) OFDMA-PON. The results verify that this scheme is feasible.