Implemention of a survivable EPON system supporting direct communication between ONUs

This article proposes and implements a survivable Ethernet passive optical network (EPON) system supporting direct communication between optical network units (ONU) without optical line terminal's (OLT) forwarding. An original centralized automatic protection switching (APS) control mechanism is proposed and implemented by FPGA. The actual test results show that our system's protection switching time is far below 50ms which is commonly required in EPON.