TDM-PON-Based Optical Access Network for Tactile Internet, 5G, and Beyond

An optical access network plays a critical role in accommodating explosive new services such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), machine-to-machine, and human-to-machine interaction applications. Continuous expansion of capacity as well as low latency in the optical access network are very important issues to avoid loss of connectivity for 5G and Tactile Internet. A time-division multiplexing passive optical network (TDM-PON) is an attractive solution to provide optical connectivity to end users in residential, business, and mobile applications since multiple remote nodes with simple optical power splitters give us easy-to-use optical connection anywhere in an optical distributed network. This article reviews TDM-PON-based optical access technologies for bandwidth-intensive as well as low-latency services, and introduces a recent feasibility demonstration of a Tactile Internet testbed. Technical challenges faced by TDM-PON for future networks in terms of capacity, latency, and virtual-izationlslicing are also discussed.