Toward Quality of Service Protection in Ethernet Passive Optical Networks: Challenges and Solutions

This article surveys various solutions proposed to date to support quality of service in EPONs. Namely, we overview the inter-and intra-ONU scheduling solutions and argue, and later show, that although these solutions can help in supporting QoS, they fall short of protecting the requirements of the admitted traffic, especially as the network becomes saturated. Hence, we present an admission control framework that is capable of supporting and protecting the QoS of real-time traffic while guaranteeing a minimum bandwidth for best effort traffic, and present an appropriate dynamic bandwidth allocation algorithm. Finally, we present numerical results to show the effectiveness of the proposed solution and compare the performance with that of intra-ONU scheduling solutions.