Huawei FTTM for the Mining Industry

Electrical Safety

The FTTM network's two-layer network architecture and passive optical network reduce the risk of underground electrical sparks.

Unlike the three-layer network architecture of a traditional Ethernet ring network, the two-layer network architecture of the FTTM industrial network requires active devices to be deployed only at the headend and end nodes of an optical ring network. At the aggregation layer, a passive optical splitter is used to replace active switches and explosion-proof boxes.

The headend node is deployed in core equipment rooms of mines, so only the end devices of the optical ring network near the service source in a mine are active. The mine tunnel between the head-end node and the end-end node — which can reach up to 40 km — is a passive optical ring network composed of passive optical components. This reduces the use of explosion-proof boxes by 40% and improves electrical safety under mines.

Service Safety

The solution's industrial optical ring network adopts a daisy chain topology: Two optical fibers at the end of each optical ring network are connected to two different optical splitters at the aggregation layer. The ends are independent of each other. When one or more ends of the optical ring network are faulty, other parts of the network are not affected. Additionally, this type of network is self-growing, so adding terminals does not affect the existing network. This eliminates the issues with the ring networking mode that traditional industrial Ethernet uses. For example, all services between the two nodes or links are interrupted when multiple access nodes or links are faulty, and this type of network needs to break the ring to add nodes, switching services multiple times in the process, which is difficult and risky.

Moreover, the topology of the industrial optical ring network as well as the equipment-level and link-level 1 + 1 redundancy protection enable services to resist multiple device and link failures and ensure that the service switching time is always less than 30 ms, achieving 100% security and reliability.

Construction Safety

Traditional optical fiber implementing requires dedicated optical fiber splicers, which are operated by experts. During fiber splicing, a high temperature of 1800 degrees Celsius is generated. Therefore, the gas concentration must be closely monitored during underground operations.

Conversely, Huawei's pre-connection solution uses advanced manufacturing techniques to improve the precision and integration of optical components. All fiber connectors are prefabricated in the factory. During onsite construction, the connections between fibers and optical components are plug-and-play, just like network cables. Underground fiber splicing operations are therefore avoided and the efficiency is improved by a factor of 10.

Maintenance Safety

Traditionally, after a fiber fault occurs, maintenance staff take a tester underground to locate the faulty fiber segment by segment. By contrast, Huawei's optical fiber intelligent diagnosis technology adds a test wavelength to the optical fiber.

Abnormal Fresnel reflection occurs when a fiber fault occurs. The intelligent analyzer captures the reflected signals and analyzes them to accurately determine the location of the fault. The location accuracy is as high as 0.5 m.

Meanwhile, the intelligent analyzer automatically sends an alarm to a client or mobile app, instructing maintenance personnel to replace the optical fiber on site. Compared with traditional inspection methods, intelligent fiber diagnosis reduces the downhole maintenance time by 90% and improves the safety of O&M staff.