A new protection scheme for a combined ring-star based hybrid WDM/TDM PON architecture

In this paper we propose a hybrid WDM/TDM PON architecture that utilizes a combined ring-star based connectivity to provide shared protection against optical line terminal (OLT) failure. We have further proposed an appropriate control mechanism governed by a proposed MAC protocol to reduce the protection switching time. We calculated the approximate reach of the proposed network. We have evaluated the availability figures of the network service per end-user subject to different failure scenarios within the proposed network architecture along with its associated capital expenditure (CAPEX) per user. Finally we have demonstrated that our proposed architecture provides a significant cost benefit over 1:1 protection scheme for achieving almost the same value of network availability.