Fiber Bragg grating-based monitoring system for fiber to the home (FTTH) passive optical network

Abstract Fiber to the home (FTTH) passive optical network is one of the cost effective and effortlessly planning systems in the current era of communication systems. However, one of the substantial limitations of this optical communication network is the monitoring operation. It is essential to locate the fault branch in the network in order to take the required action to overcome the problem. Unfortunately, since the network is all passive, it is necessary to introduce a technique that should be passive and has the capacity to locate the fault location inside the network. In this paper, a methodology to localize the fault line was introduced, where a combination of Fiber Bragg Gratings was suggested, using this approach, the fault location can be easily determined among 36-branch, distributed in eight groups. Simulation results show that the broken line can be determined through monitoring the reflected signals from all the branches in the Central Office without paying any power to locate the leakage. In other words, it is easy to recognize the fault location by monitoring the power of the reflected signals, where after comprehensive simulations and power calculations, it was possible to put a threshold for that reflected power, hence, the fault branch, for any reason, may reflect power of less than that threshold, otherwise, the branch is not considered as broken.