Protection strategy for cascaded Passive Optical Networks

Passive Optical Network (PON) is the promising technology in future broadband access networks. Protection is an important and imperative issue in PON system while protection of cascaded PON (with two-stage splitter or more) system has been ignored. This paper presents a comprehensive study on protection strategy for cascaded PON system. The reliability and protection issues of cascaded PON are studied using theoretical analysis and numerical simulations. A function called Reliability Cost Ratio (RCR) is presented to evaluate the performance of different protection strategies. Simulation shows the variation trend of RCR with different splitter schemes.