Impact of protection mechanisms on cost in PONs

Passive optical networks (PONs) are considered as a promising solution for broadband access networks. Due to the growing demand for reliable service delivery, fault management in the network is becoming very significant. However, there is a trade off between the cost of protection and the level of service reliability. Since economical aspects are most critical in the access part of the networks, improving reliability performance by duplication of network resources can be too expensive. Therefore, some recent works focused on PON protection schemes with reduced capital expenditures (CAPEX). The future trend will probably migrate towards minimizing the operational expenditures (OPEX) during the access network lifetime. This work presents a cost comparison of different protection mechanisms that can be applied in passive optical networks. The impact that different protection approaches have on the cost related both to the equipment to be deployed and the failure reparation and service penalties to be paid is evaluated.