This paper proposes and devises a simple and cost-effective native Ethernet-based self-healing WDM-PON access ring architecture for next-generation broadband access. Specifically, this paper proposes and devises simple, efficient, and cost-effective fully distributed fault detection and recovery schemes for the proposed WDM-PON ring architecture. The main characteristics of the proposed architecture is that it supports a fully distributed control plane among the ONUs, which enables each and every ONU to independently detect, manage, and recover most of the networking failure scenarios.