Abstract: In various example embodiments, a system, method and apparatus are provided for scalable protocol snooping in a PON. In an example embodiment, a method is provided. The method may include receiving a control packet on a network. The method may further include snooping the control packet. The method may also include duplicating the control packet to produce a duplicate control packet. Additionally, the method may include transmitting the control packet and a duplicate control packet to an external network. Moreover, the method may include processing the control packet. In another example embodiment, a method is presented. The method may include receiving a control packet. The method may also include receiving a duplicate control packet on a dedicated port. The method may further include snooping the control packet and the duplicate control packet. Also, the method may include passing the control packet on to an external network. Furthermore, the method may include processing the duplicate control packet.

Abstract: In optical Ethernet networks, receiver side link loss is not known on a transmitter side network element, and a transmitter at a receiver side network element does not know of the receiver side link loss without special, very expensive, optical transmitters or a Gigabit Media Independent Interface (GMII). Example embodiments of the present invention can accomplish informing a network node on the transmit side of a network link by disabling communications from a network node on a receive side of the network link to the network node on the transmit side of the communications link. The network node on the transmit side of the communications link detects the receiver side loss through this indirect technique and works within existing protocols of network nodes. Example embodiments can work on all optical Ethernet interfaces regardless of speed and is less expensive than employing optical transmitters designed to detect receiver side link loss.