Abstract Currently a massive amount of traffic per second is delivered through EPON systems, one of the prominent access network technologies for delivering the next generation network. Therefore, it is vital to keep the EPON optical distribution network (ODN) working by providing the necessity protection mechanism in the deployed devices; otherwise, when failures occur it will cause a great loss for both network operators and business customers. In this paper, we propose a bus-connected architecture to protect and recover distribution drop fiber (DDF) link faults or transceiver failures at ONU(s) in SIEPON system. The proposed architecture provides a cost-effective architecture, which delivers the high fault-tolerance in handling multiple DDF faults, while also providing flexibility in choosing the backup ONU assignments. Simulation results show that the proposed architecture provides the reliability and maintains quality of service (QoS) performance in terms of mean packet delay, system throughput, packet loss and EF jitter when DDF link failures occur.