There are two types of protection switching : a) automatic switching and b) forced switching. The switching mechanism is generally realised by OAM functions, therefore, the required OAM information field should be reserved in the PLOAM cells. This paper proposes an unidirectional and a bidirectional protection switching method and potential advantages. The unidirectional protection switching method can be faster than the bidirectional method because the unidirectional method does not require an APS protocol for protection switching. The bidirectional protection switching method uses APS K1 byte and K2 byte, which is included in octets of a PST message through downstream or upstream PLOAM cells, for protection switching. As making comparisons between the unidirectional and the bidirectional protection. switching method, this paper proposes an effective constructing method for ATM-PON network.