Advanced Transmission-Reflection-Analysis (TRA) system for Long-Reach Passive Optical Network monitoring

Long-Reach Passive Optical Networks (LR-PONs) allows for extending the distance between the central office (CO) and end users from a few kilometers to several tens of kilometers and beyond. It in turn reduces the number of active equipment in the field, bringing potentially cost saving. However, due to its high capacity and large coverage, LR-PON becomes increasingly vulnerable to various failures. Therefore, network monitoring becomes extremely important to guarantee an appropriate level of network reliability and performance. In this paper, we report on an advanced LR-PON monitoring solution that can supervise the whole LR-PON ring section in a cost-effective manner. Instead of using the conventional optical time domain reflectometry (OTDR) approach, we implement multi wavelength Transmission-Reflection Analysis (nλ-TRA) as the monitoring technique. The TRA approach is based on the unique relationship between the optical powers transmitted and backscattered by the fiber for a given loss location. Since TRA only requires measuring the power levels of monitoring signals, it outperforms other conventional methods thanks to its superior detection speed and a simple system configuration. Both experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed system can reach high accuracy for fault localization.