Abstract:

The rapid growth of new services and emerging network scenarios has serious impact on the existing network infrastructure，and it is an inevitable trend to build a new，high-speed and efficient access network architecture.The challenges faced by the existing network were analyzed，and it was pointed out that high-speed broadband access，efficient resource utilization，support for heterogeneous resource control would be future trends in the evolution of optical access networks.Then the access network development was recalled，the overall architecture of software-defined optical access network was described，SDN idea and OLT pooling technology were introduced into optical access network，and the major key technologies were analyzed，including the flexible programmable optical layer techniques，fine flow table forwarding，control layer virtualization，and etc.Several typical application scenarios suitable for software-defined optical access network were also presented.All of these indicate that the research and development on software-defined optical access network will meet current challenges and ultimately be helpful to achieve the end-to-end flexible control in the entire network.

Key words: optical access network, passive optical network, software defined networking