A Novel Partial Protection Architecture to Enhance Reliability in Optical Access Networks

Optical access networks (OANs) have been favored as future access networks due to their capability to meet high bandwidth requirement of users. OANs have been deployed mainly as time division multiplexing based passive optical networks (TDM PON), such as Ethernet PON (EPON) and gigabit capable PON (GPON) and long-reach PON (LR-PON). These OANs are designed using optical devices, such as optical line terminal (OLT), passive splitter and combiners (PSCs), optical network units (ONUs), and using optical fiber. Some optical devices (viz. OLT and PSCs) and some part of optical fiber are shared by multiple users. Therefore, if any shared device and/or fiber fails, multiple users are simultaneously disconnected, partial protection architecture with reference to LR-PONs to enhance reliability in OANs by providing protection against failure of devices and optical fibers (links) with high failure impact factor. We show that proposed partial protection architecture improves availability of a network connection significantly. We also show that quality of service performance, such as average packet delay, average buffer size and average cycle time are preserved in the proposed partial protection architecture.