SummaryDirect communication between optical network units (ONUs) provides the opportunity to reduce substantial latency among two communicating ONUs, which is very significant for next generation optical networks. In this paper, an expandable intersection‐ring architecture to support direct communication among ONUs is proposed. By adopting two tunable fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs), direct peer‐to‐peer communication of ONUs can be achieved. By utilizing the cyclic routing property of arrayed waveguide grating (AWG), upstream/downstream communication together with direct communication among ONUs can be carried out simultaneously. By adopting intersection‐ring topology, any two adjacent flexible expansion nodes (FENs) on the main ring can be used as intersections to extend a new subring, the scale of the network can be enhanced greatly. Meanwhile, not only the protection of multiple fiber faults can be realized, but also the fault protection of key nodes can be performed. By using a strategy of transmitting signals separately from the top and the bottom branches of the ring, communication efficiency can be improved, transmission latency can be reduced, and fault isolation can be achieved effectively. By the simulation experiment, the effectiveness of the proposed network is demonstrated.