Experimental End-to-End Demonstration of Shared N:M Dual-Homed Protection in SDN-Controlled Long-Reach PON and Pan-European Core

Abstract

Seeking reduction of capital and operational costs on next-generation fiber networks is the holy grail of network planning and deployment for all operators worldwide. In particular, efficient deployment strategies of next-generation fiber access networks is of paramount importance to enable wide-scale ubiquitous deployment of high-speed broadband services. Exploiting the large capacity of fiber networks to support heterogeneous services from residential and business users is a promising strategy toward this goal. Long-reach passive optical networks (LR-PON) is one such strategy that also adopts greater sharing of active and passive components, together with consolidation of central offices, to reduce capital and operational expenditures. However, due to its long reach and large split ratio, protection mechanisms become a major consideration when designing an LR-PON, as a single feeder cable cut could disrupt services for several thousand users. In this paper, we demonstrate fast restoration of LR-PON services using a dual-homed shared optical line terminal (OLT) protection mechanism. Our end-to-end testbed connects our optical access broadband laboratory operating on custom built LR-PON ONU and OLT field programmable gate array prototypes with a Europe-wide testbed core network. We use a software-defined network control plane to manage the dual-homed N:M protection switching and traffic reroute in the core and achieve access protection and end-to-end services restoration times of 40 and 80 ms, respectively.