Design and Implementation of a Last-Mile Optical Network for Distribution Automation

In recent years, it has been a worldwide trend that many electric utilities give their attention to applying cutting-edge networking technology to their aging infrastructure and power plants and distribution systems. Following this trend, many power companies have installed optical communication lines for their last mile network, called fiber to the pole, along their power distribution lines and at the same time, have made much effort to develop their own distribution automation (DA). In this paper, new network architecture of optical network using one core is proposed for the DA. The results strongly show that the application of the optical network technology to the DA is potentially beneficial in reliability, speed, and expandability. This paper presents the design principle and its implementation of the optical network for DA.