Dynamic upstream bandwidth allocation over Ethernet PONs

Ethernet passive optical networks (EPONs) are a low-cost, high-speed solution to the bottleneck problem of the broadband access network. 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 in order to facilitate statistical multiplexing among the local network traffics. This paper proposes a dynamic bandwidth allocation scheme, i.e., limited sharing with traffic prediction (LSTP), for the upstream channel sharing. Based on the MultiPoint Control Protocol (MPCP) and the bursty, traffic prediction, LSTP yields significant performance improvement as compared to other existing proposals.