Delay Sensitive EPON Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation Mechanism

Ethernet passive optical network (EPON) is one of the potential solutions for the next generation access technology. Its economical equipment and maintenance costs are particularly attractive to telecommunication service providers. The EPON has a tree topology and the upstream bandwidth from optical network terminals to the optical line terminal is shared. To utilize the bandwidth in a fair and efficient manner, numerous dynamic bandwidth allocation schemes are proposed in the literature. In this paper, we will introduce and review these schemes, list their strength and weakness. One of our goals in this paper is to give an overview to the current status of research in this area. We will also introduce our preliminary work on a new scheme that consider performance guarantee on both bandwidth and delay. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to provide absolute guarantee on both performance metrics in EPON. In conclusion, we summarize future works and point out the pending challenges for future study.