Minimizing the arrayed waveguide grating cost and the optical cable cost in deploying WDM passive optical networks

We investigate the issue of minimizing the cost of optical cables and arrayed waveguide gratings (AWGs) in deploying optical distribution networks using WDM passive optical networks (PONs). Generally, when deploying WDM PONs with cascaded AWGs, increasing the number of stages of cascaded AWGs decreases the optical fiber costs, but increases the AWG cost. A proper cascaded AWG structure and proper connections between AWGs and optical network units are needed to minimize the total cost of AWGs and optical cables. We decompose the network planning problem into two subproblems. One is to decide the positions of AWGs and placement of optical cables to minimize the cost of optical cables. The other one is to determine the cascaded AWG structure to minimize the total cost of AWGs and optical cables. In particular, we propose a recursive partitioncombination-based algorithm to achieve the optimal trade-off between the AWG cost and the optical cable cost.