A Novel Protection Architecture Scheme for EPON

With the rapid development of the Internet and extraordinary increase of bandwidth requirement, fiber based networks emerge and become more and more popular. The EPON (Ethernet Passive Optical Network) technology, which combines the mature Ethernet technology and high-bandwidth PON technology, is an ideal access method to achieve fiber based network service and appears to be the most widely-used access network. Thus, information reliability is becoming more and more important, making the protection of fiber based networks more and more necessary and crucial. Nowadays most EPONs are protected against failures by adopting redundant network equipments. This study proposes a novel protection method for EPON, which is more reliable and safer than existing schemes. This protection architecture scheme is able to provide protection for EPON and point out the exact failure reason for further physical recovery and repairing by the Network Management (NM) Server. Actual operations show that the proposed scheme can provide protection for at least three types of failures, i.e., the ONU link failure, the OLT link failure and the OLT failure.