Self-Healing Optical Access Networks (SHOAN) Operated by Optical Switching Technologies

An optical access network should offer low-cost reliable services to its end users. To address this problem, an optimal solution is needed which can turn an optical access architecture into a self-healing system. Hence, we propose the Self-Healing Optical Access Network (SHOAN), in which two or more optical access architectures are partners of each other, and they are interconnected by elementary optical crossbar switches into a simple mesh network. In SHOAN, the crossbar switches can keep each access architecture as an independent and closed system for only serving its own end users in normal state. But the crossbars become open in fault scenarios. Whenever a failure occurs in the network, the fault can be monitored and affected services can be recovered by the partner of the access architecture that is affected. Such an interconnected optical access network can withstand failures in its transmission paths, and recover network services in a self-healing way. Compared to existing solutions (e.g., dual-home architecture), illustrative examples demonstrate that SHOAN has many desirable properties: (1) it is robust because risks are disjointed, (2) it is reliable because service recovery is given top priority, and (3) it has low cost because redundant backup components are not necessary since the partner´s resources act as backup resources. Analysis results show that SHOAN can minimize disruption duration and network cost for broadband access services.