Implementing QoS in SIEPON

Worldwide traction for EPON has led to the development of the Service Interoperability in EPON (SIEPON) specification. This standard is being developed to ensure EPON equipment from different vendors will interoperate not just at the physical layer, but at higher service layers as well. One of the main aspects that SIEPON addresses is the establishment of QoS in EPON. The QoS service parameters include bandwidth assignment to subscriber traffic, frame delay, frame delay variation, and frame loss ratio. The guarantees implied by these parameters are needed for operators deploying time- and delay sensitive real-time services such as IPTV, VoIP, and circuit emulation. The SIEPON standard defines a flexible EPON service path (ESP) that enables operators to configure bandwidth-related service quality parameters to which EPON devices adhere. In this article, we describe how QoS is realized in EPON using the ESP and other concepts defined in SIEPON.