Bandwidth measurements and capacity exploitation in Gigabit Passive Optical Networks

We report an experimental investigation on the measurement of the available bandwidth for users in Gigabit Passive Optical Networks (GPON) and the limitations caused by the Internet protocols. We point out that the huge capacity offered by the GPON highlights the enormous differences that can be showed among the available and actually exploitable bandwidth in the case of TCP. In this ultrabroadband environment we also investigated on use of the UDP and of the multisession TCP. A correlation in terms of QoE is also reported.