Limited sharing with traffic prediction for dynamic bandwidth allocation and QoS provisioning over Ethernet passive optical networks

As an inexpensive, simple, and scalable solution for broadband access, Ethernet passive optical networks (EPONs) have the capability of delivering integrated broadband services to the end users. A critical issue of EPONs is the utility of a shared upstream channel among the local users, and thus an efficient bandwidth allocation mechanism is required to facilitate statistical multiplexing among the local network traffic. In this paper we propose a dynamic bandwidth allocation scheme, i.e., limited sharing with traffic prediction (LSTP), for upstream channel sharing over EPONs. LSTP enables dynamic bandwidth negotiation between the optical line terminal (OLT) and its associated optical network units (ONUs), alleviates data delay by predicting the traffic arrived during the waiting time and prereserving a portion of bandwidth for delivery, and avoids the aggressive bandwidth competition by upper bounding the allocated bandwidth to each ONU. Theoretical analysis and simulation results verify the feasibility of LSTP by showing that LSTP outperforms other existing schemes with respect to QoS metrics of data delay and data loss. © 2005 Optical Society of America