Design and Analysis of a Self-Healing High-Capacity Optical Communication Network for 5G Applications

Abstract

With the rising number of applications for 5G, the demand has surged for optical access networks that are high in capacity and are reliable. In this paper, a high capacity and resilient optical communication system based on double weight zero cross-correlation (DW-ZCC) optical code division multiple access (OCDMA) and hybrid fiber/free-space optical (FSO) protection architecture is proposed. The essence of the transmission is the combination of high-capacity DW-ZCC transmission and a dual-path fiber/FSO protection scheme and optical switching in the optical network terminal (ONT). The proposed architecture is assessed with the help of OptiSystem simulations and reliability analysis. The results of the simulations also demonstrate the effect of the FSO link length on the received power and quality factor (QF), achieving 99.999% connection availability for the proposed architecture and 99.9954% for the conventional architecture, while the QF remains higher than 43 over the range of FSO distances investigated. Reliability analysis also reveals that the proposed architecture reaches a five-nines connection availability whilst the conventional architecture achieves 0.999954. The outcome results show the potential of the proposed integrated architecture to transmit high capacity and to be more resilient for optical access of the 5G network.