Efficient resiliency mechanisms for next generation passive optical networks

Future broadband access networks are expected to cover large service areas while fulfilling high bandwidth request on a per-user basis. The rapidly increasing traffic demand is also driven by the growing popularity of mobile data services, which is placing high-capacity requirement on the backhaul. Due to advances in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology, WDM based architectures have been considered as promising candidates for next generation optical access, such as WDM passive optical network (PON), and hybrid WDM/time division multiplexing (TDM) PON. Meanwhile, resilience technique will play a more prominent role in emerging access networks due to their significantly increased capacity and coverage compared to the current deployments. Therefore, efficient resiliency mechanisms are highly required to enable uninterrupted network operation where a certain level of reliability performance can be guaranteed. In this work, we first evaluate reliability performance of each segment of next generation optical access networks and then identify the most important part for protection. A particular attention is paid to the reduction of failure impact.