Protection strategies for next generation passive optical networks -2

Next Generation Passive Optical Networks-2 (NGPON2) are being considered to upgrade the current PON technology to meet the ever increasing bandwidth requirements of the end users while optimizing the network operators' investment. Reliability performance of NG-PON2 is very important due to the extended reach and, consequently, large number of served customers per PON segment. On the other hand, the use of more complex and hence more failure prone components than in the current PON systems may degrade reliability performance of the network. Thus designing reliable NG-PON2 architectures is of a paramount importance. Moreover, for appropriately evaluating network reliability performance, new models are required. For example, the commonly used reliability parameter, i.e., connection availability, defined as the percentage of time for which a connection remains operable, doesn't reflect the network wide reliability performance. The network operators are often more concerned about a single failure affecting a large number of customers than many uncorrelated failures disconnecting fewer customers while leading to the same average failure time. With this view, we introduce a new parameter for reliability performance evaluation, referred to as the failure impact. In this paper, we propose several reliable architectures for two important NGPON2 candidates: wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) PON and time and wavelength division multiplexed (TWDM) PON. Furthermore, we evaluate protection coverage, availability, failure impact and cost of the proposed schemes in order to identify the most efficient protection architecture

Toward reliable hybrid WDM/TDM passive optical networks

Individual users and enterprises are increasingly relying on the access to internet services and cannot accept long interruption time as easily as before. Moreover, the main characteristics of next generation optical access (NGOA) networks, such as long reach and a large number of users per feeder line, turn the network reliability to an important design parameter to offer uninterrupted service delivery. In this regard, protection mechanisms become one of the crucial aspects that need to be considered in the design process of access networks. On the other hand, it should be noted that not all users can afford to pay a high extra cost for protection; hence, it is important to provide resilience in a cost-efficient way. A PON combining WDM and TDM technologies, referred to as hybrid WDM/TDM PON or HPON, is one of the most promising candidates for NGOA networks due to its ability to serve a large number of subscribers and offer high capacity per user. For these reasons, in this article, we propose HPON architecture offering different degrees of resilience depending on the user profiles (i.e., partial and full protection for residential and business access, respectively). Also, the investment cost of providing resilience for the proposed schemes is investigated considering various protection upgrade road maps. Our results confirm that protecting the shared part of network with a large number of users is required in order to keep the failure impact at an acceptable level, with less than 5 percent increase of investment cost compared to the unprotected case. Meanwhile, the proposed end-to-end protection for business users considerably reduces the risk of service interruption for this type of demanding user without a need to duplicate the deployment cost of an unprotected connection. Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis is performed to investigate the impact of changes in business user percentage and protection upgrade time on the deployment cost. The results may be used as advice on cost-efficient deployment of reliable fiber access networks