Monitoring of passive optical networks utilising an optical coding technique

Passive Optical Networks (PONs) have become the most popular fibre based access networks over the last decade. They are widely deployed for use in Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) scenarios. PON is a point-to-multipoint connection (P2MP) between an optical line terminal (OLT) located at the central office (CO) and multiple optical network units (ONU) at the customer premises. The next generation of PONs (NG-PON) are likely to deploy a ring-and-spur long reach PON (LR-PON). NG-PON aims to accommodate more ONUs, extend the network coverage out to 100 km, minimize complexity and improve operational outcomes. An all fibre access network, operating over extended distances, presents a reliability risk, thereby increasing the need for a reliable and cost-effective monitoring system to enhance protection and reduce restoration time. Among existing monitoring techniques, attention is focused on approaches that use optical code division multiplexing (OCDM), also known as optical coding (OC). The OC is applied to a signal that is sent from the network management system (NMS) to the ONUs. The monitoring signal is transmitted onto a fibre and split into a number of sub-signals that are equal in number to the ONUs. Each one of the ONUs receives a sub-signal, encodes it, and then reflects it back to the NMS. The NMS has the capability to identify faulty ONUs by examining the code received from the ONUs. A review of the literature has shown that the use of OCs does improve system performance, especially in the timely detection of faults. Many of the studies, found in the literature, focus on how to implement optical spreading codes that are used in OCDM Access (OCDMA) systems and currently the optical orthogonal code (OOC) is the dominant code implemented for time-domain coding. Although the OOC code performs well, its construction is relatively complex. The available code-words (cardinality) that are offered by OOC are proportional to the code length. Implementing OOC in a high capacity PON requires a long code length causes an inevitable degradation of system performance. Therefore, an improved optical coding technique for PONs should provide code-words that conform to PON split ratios. The main objective of the research was to develop an optical spreading code, based on a prime code family for OCDMA systems, that has the capability to accommodate different PON split ratios and with characteristics that improve transmission system performance when compared to existing prime code families. The novel code presented in this thesis is identified as the extended grouped new modified prime code (EG-nMPC). The number of code-words generated by the proposed codes are substantially higher than those generated by the existing code families and more compatible to the different PON splitting ratios. In addition, with a low code weight, both power consumption and hardware complexity decreases. The code performance was evaluated using mathematical models for two transmission formats - pulse position modulation (PPM) and on-off keying (OOK) modulation. The performance of EG-nMPC was compared to other prime codes, and the results show that the proposed code improves the performance of OCDMA in terms of bit-error rate (BER). As PON is a point-to-multipoint connection oriented access network, downstream traffic is encrypted and broadcast to all ONUs, while the unencrypted upstream traffic from each ONU terminal occurs in a burst mode. The OLT carries out a ranging process to determine transmission delays between ONUs, to prevent collisions between the burst mode traffic from each of the ONUs. In this research, the burst mode traffic ranging process has been replicated in the monitoring system, with this replication providing a fixed equalization delay time for the monitoring transmissions. To investigate the ring-and-spur LR-PON reliability several protection architectures were evaluated, in term of cost and availability, to determine the optimal protection architecture. In this thesis, the reliability parameter Failure Impact Robustness (FIR), has been used to calculate the failure impact of the different components in ring-and-spur LR-PON, hence selecting the optimal protection scheme. A PON-based optical communication system model was developed and the proposed EG-nMPC code was incorporated. Fibre split ratios of 32, 64 and 128, were considered in this study. The simulation results show that the EG-nMPC code improves the performance, efficiency and accuracy of the PON transmission monitoring system. To conclude, this research aims to enhance the PON performance by a fast detection of the fault and quick restoration. This research has contributed to knowledge by identifying a new and novel spreading code that is compatible with the different PON splitting ratios for OC monitoring techniques. By using the ranging process, a fixed equalization delay time has been assigned to each ONU to manage the upstream burst traffic. The spreading code has been implemented in a real-time simulation to show the status of each fibre link. The implementation was carried out based on 1-D tree topology system. However, the proposed EG-nMPC can be exploited to enable network monitoring that is based on hybrid 1D/2D coding. This coding is complementary with the structure of LR-PON as explained in section ‎8.2.3. In addition, with the use of the FIR parameter for the different components in the ring-and-spur architecture, an optimal protection scheme for both OLT and the ring (feeder fibre), has been nominated. This protection scheme ensures that protection, availability and cost are at their optimal values