ONU discovery using multiple subchannels for seamless service support in long-reach OFDMA-PON

In a passive optical network (PON), discovery is a process that detects and registers newly connected optical network units (ONUs). A long-reach PON requires a longer discovery window, e.g., at least 1 ms for 100 km, due to the increased round-trip time between an optical line terminal (OLT) and an ONU. The longer discovery window consumes more network resources and issues longer service-interruption time. From this motivation, for a long-reach orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA)-PON, we propose a discovery method using multiple subchannels, where each subchannel consists of one or several subcarrier(s). Compared to discovery using a single channel, the proposed discovery method can increase the number of successfully detected ONUs at the same resources (i.e., for a discovery window) and ensure seamless service support to already registered ONUs, by assigning some subchannels for discovery and the remainder for data transmission. We analyze the discovery efficiency (i.e., the number of successfully detected ONUs in the discovery process) based on a probability and optimize the discovery window size by numerical simulations.