Optical network unit-based traffic prediction for Ethernet passive optical networks

The authors propose a novel traffic prediction method for the minimisation of packet delay in Ethernet passive optical networks. The method relies on traffic monitoring at the optical network units (ONUs) and utilises readily available traffic information to predict the accumulated burst size of each respective ONU in the following cycle. They demonstrate that a significant delay enhancement can be accomplished by reporting the predicted, rather than the current, burst size to the optical line terminal (OLT). The author´s simulation results show that a delay improvement of over 25% can be expected by the proposed method without modifying the well-established interleaved polling scheme with adaptive cycle time dynamic bandwidth assignment scheme at the OLT.