GCO coordinates recently succeeded Scalable Advanced Ring-Based passive Dense Access Network Architecture (SARDANA) european project.

This will be a project of 36 months' length, targeted to the performance enhancement of dense Fibre-To-The-Home networks, also called PONs (Passive Optical Networks). These networks constitute the fundamental segment with the required potential to match the huge capacity of transport networks with the new user communication demands, where deeper research is still to be performed.

The two key performances that this project aims to radically improve are the scalability and the robustness, since they constitute pillars of such a cost-sensitive segment. Scalability is reached by means of cascadable remote nodes in a new hybrid architecture, allowing smoothest grow and migration, and the new adoption of remotely-pumped amplification, WDM/TDM overlay, while keeping the passiveness of the PON and reducing civil work investments. The resulting network is able to serve between 1000 and 4000 users with symmetric several hundred Mbit/s, spread along distances between 20 and 100 km, at 10 Gbit/s. Robustness is achieved by means of the development of new monitoring and electronic compensation strategies over the PON, as well as by the passive central-ring protection.

For more information, please contact Access & Transmission research area.