A novel WDM passive optical network with bi-directional protection

Passive optical networks (PONs) have recently emerged to be a promising approach to enhance the penetration of fiber towards the subscriber side, thus further enables delivery of higher data-rate services to the subscribers. They feature easy network maintenance as there is no active component at the remote node (RN). However, in conventional PONs, both upstream and downstream bandwidths have to be time-shared among all optical network units (ONUs). By applying WDM technique to PONs, the total system capacity can be further enhanced. Each ONU enjoys a dedicated bandwidth and resolves the ranging problem as in PONs. In both conventional PON and WDM-PON, little work has been done to offer protection capability though fiber fault detection methods have been extensively studied. We propose a novel network architecture for WDM-PON which offers 1:1 protection capability. In case of any fiber cut between remote node and ONUs, the affected ONU can re-route the wavelength channels via the adjacent ONU and can still maintain normal bidirectional traffic.