Remotely powered and reconfigured quasi-passive reconfigurable nodes for optical access networks

Quasi-Passive Reconfigurable (QPAR) nodes have been proposed to provide flexible power/wavelength allocation in optical access networks. QPAR only consumes power during reconfiguration, which is remotely transmitted from the central office, thus maintaining the passive nature of the network. In this paper, a QPAR control circuit is designed, and a remotely powered and reconfigured 1 × 2 × 2 QPAR (i.e., one wavelength, two power levels, and two output ports) with a 0.1 F/5 V supercapacitor (SC) remotely charged by a 1 × 8 photodiode array is experimentally demonstrated. The charged SC can power the QPAR for at least 6 s with 24 consecutive reconfigurations (200 ms each) or two reconfigurations within a maximum period of 40 hours, before the SC needs to be recharged. In addition, the demonstrated QPAR remote power scheme is compared with the previously proposed Direct Photovoltaic Power option both theoretically and experimentally. Results show that the SC based remote power mechanism is capable of driving a large number of reconfigurations simultaneously and it is better for large dimension QPARs.