Passive Optical Network Survivability: Protection, Detection and Restoration

Abstract

Passive optical network (PON) technologies have received increasing attention as demand for fibre access networks has grown. Enhancing fibre access network reliability provides lower operational costs, and improves customer satisfaction. This paper discusses PON survivability including protection schemes for the fiber link and the Optical Line Terminal (OLT), the exciting monitoring techniques of the fiber link, and the effect of reducing the restoration time on the network availability. The main contribution of this study is to provide two protection schemes namely OLT-only-protected and OLT-and-ring protected. The proposed schemes are designed to handle instances of single failure affecting all customers in the network. This work considers three key performance metrics- Failure Impact Robustness (FIR), cost, and availability. The objective of the proposed protection architectures is to guarantee high quality of service at low costs by protecting critical network elements such as OLT and fiber ring. The proposed architectures have been compared with other well-known protection schemes. The results postulate that OLT-and-ring protected approach has 99.993% availability with a 0.09% increase in cost compared to the ring-only protection architecture.