Bandwidth allocation for service level agreement aware Ethernet passive optical networks

Passive optical networks (PON) are thought to be the next step in the development of access networks and providing broadband access in the "last mile" area. Ethernet PON (EPON) are gaining the most attention from industry as they offer a highly flexible, cost effective solution. In this paper, we present a new approach to the problem of optimal bandwidth allocation in EPON. We show that by moving all the access control functionality to the optical line terminator, a flexible solution could be achieved which offers full support for service level agreements and removes the burden of managing the configuration of every optical network unit. We include results of simulations that show that such an approach can deliver good performance in terms of average and maximum packet delay. We show that a novel Grant multiplexing scheme can significantly reduce jitter and end-to-end delay experienced by the high priority classes of traffic. To prove these points we present results of detailed experiments that were run on a C++ event driven simulator, that we have developed.