A New efficient dynamic MAC protocol for the delivery of multiple services over GPON

Abstract

The Gigabit-capable passive optical network (GPON) has become an attractive and promising solution for the broadband access network. It is apparent that an efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol is crucial not only to catalyze the utilization of the upstream resources but also to support the GPON encapsulation method (GEM) for multiple services over GPON. A new approach for bandwidth reporting is developed to achieve dynamic awareness of both the changes of ONU queue status and the consequences of previous allocations. In addition, a novel balance transferring mechanism that enables a register and transfer process for successive allocation across multiple frames is presented. By incorporating the new schemes of bandwidth reporting process and the balance transferring mechanism into a frame-based scheduling procedure, an efficient dynamic bandwidth assignment MAC protocol is developed to support differentiated services over GPON. The performance of the new protocol is simulated and evaluated under a variety of traffic distributions. Simulated characteristics demonstrate a significantly improved network performance.