IPACT a dynamic protocol for an Ethernet PON (EPON)

We investigate design issues for access networks based on passive optical network technology. A PON based on polling, with data encapsulated in Ethernet frames, possesses many desirable qualities, such as dynamic bandwidth distribution, use of a single downstream and a single upstream wavelength, ability to provision a fractional wavelength capacity to each user, and ease of adding a new user. To support dynamic bandwidth distribution, we propose an interleaved polling algorithm called IPACT. We also suggest a scheme for in-band signaling that allows using a single wavelength for both downstream data and control message transmission. To obtain realistic simulation results, we generated synthetic traffic that exhibits the properties of self-similarity and long-range dependence. We then analyzed the network performance under varying offered loads.