Energy consumption and reliability performance of survivable passive optical converged networks: public ITS case study

Access networks are evolving fast by increasing their capacity and coverage area, coping with a larger number of users and variety of terminals. Operators aim at keeping high network performance and quality of service but limiting their capital and operational expenditures by, e.g., minimizing investments and energy consumption using power saving at the network components. To address these challenges this paper evaluates the energy consumption, connection availability, and failure detection time of three protection schemes applicable for converged access networks: disjoint fiber protection, energy-efficient disjoint fiber protection, and reflective disjoint fiber protection. The schemes are assessed by a case study considering a public intelligent transport system (ITS). The studied ITS deploys a dedicated short-range communications radio access network connected to the service server through a protected passive access network. Comparison with unprotected architecture shows that reflective disjoint fiber protection offers low energy consumption and high connection availability, while it significantly reduces the failure detection time and, hence, the connection interruption time.