Traffic characterization study on EPON upstream channel

Metropolitan ring networks are usually used to connect the high speed backbone networks with access networks. Until now, the metropolitan network and the access network are gained much attention of researchers. However they have been investigated in separate ways. There is no work in which the end-to-end performance from end-users of the access network to metropolitan network is evaluated. How to simulate a complete end-to-end network while keeping basic characteristics of access and metro traffic is an emergence problem to evaluate the end-to-end performance. In reality, a complete end-to-end network in which hundreds of Ethernet Passive Optical Network (EPON) are connected to metro ring networks cannot be simulated because of the huge amount of traffic generated from the access network side. In this paper, we aim to obtain trace files of incoming traffic at the entrance of Optical Line Terminal (OLT) by running simulations of an EPON network which implements Interleaved Polling with Adaptive Cycle Time (IPACT). Then, the generated traffic pattern will be characterized in order to find corresponding traffic model among well known traffic models and this model will be used as output traffic of OLTs. After, we can use this traffic model without simulating a complete EPON network. Through various simulations, we observe that the generated traffic that comes to OLT is similar to the traffic obtained with Poisson sources.