Application of SANTAD in network monitoring and fault detection of FTTH-PON

This paper presented a new approach to monitor the network performance and detect any occurrence of fault in fiber-to-the-home passive optical network (FTTH-PON) using an efficient monitoring system named Smart Access Network Testing, Analyzing and Database (SANTAD). An optical time domain reflectometer (OTDR) with 1625 nm laser source is located at central office (CO) and connected to a remote personnel computer (PC) via Ethernet TCP/IP connection. A tapper circuit is designed to allow the OTDR testing signal to bypass the optical splitter in a conventional FTTH-PON when emitted in downstream direction. The key idea is to accumulate all OTDR measurement to be displayed on a PC computer screen for centralized monitoring and advanced data analyzing. The main advantages of this work is to improve the survivability and efficiency of FTTH-PON, while reduce the hands on workload as well as maintenance cost and time. The proposed system was implemented in a FTTH-PON network testbed and the experimental results showed that the proposed system achieves high accuracy in addressing the exact failure location.