Fiber Optical Line Protection Switches

Agiltron produces net-ready Optical line protection (OLP) switches at competitive pricing.  OLP is an economical solution to secure the stability and reliability of an optical network, reducing the risks of  optical fiber faults and line interruption.    Instead of one fiber route to link two sites,  OLP uses two routes in which one is active and another a redundant spare line.  The operation principle is that when the optical power inside the active fiber gets lower than a user-defined threshold, the OLP automatically switches the link to go through the secondary path, restoring the communication and services.  There are several commonly used optical line protection architectures:

OLP 1:1
The most commonly used OLP is OLP 1:1, as shown in the diagram below, consisting of the main fiber route and a standby fiber route between the two sites and associated fiber optical switches. In normal operation, the data are transmitted and received through the main route.  Inside ILP, detectors are incorporated at Rx ports to detect the decreasing of the optical power. When a fault is detected on the main route, the system will switch both the transmitting and receiving from the main route to the standby route. The advantages of 1:1 OLP system are low optical insertion loss, and the optical fiber for the backup path can also be used for other business.
OLP 1+1
OLP 1+1 is shown in the following diagram,  in which the optical power from Tx is split into two with a ratio of 50:50 and transmits through both main and standby routes.  While for Rx, the optical signal with better quality will be selected when a fault is detected. The advantage of OLP 1+1 system is less optical switching. However, there will be larger insertion loss compared with the OLP 1:1 system.