A modified max-min fair dynamic bandwidth allocation algorithm for XG-PONs

Passive Optical Networks (PONs) are a promising architecture for providing broadband access to the end user and XG-PON is the latest ITU-T PON standard, which provides line rates of up to 10 Gb/s. In XG-PON systems, the shared access of the upstream bandwidth necessitates the use of media access control (MAC) protocols that efficiently allocate the available capacity among multiple subscribers. Within this context, we present in this work an XG-PON oriented dynamic bandwidth allocation (DBA) algorithm that distributes the available upstream bandwidth by taking into account delay limits and fairness considerations. To this end, the proposed algorithm implements a max-min fair allocation scheme in order to distribute the available bandwidth to all the connected Optical Network Units (ONUs) at the PON. In the same time, the algorithm is engineered to always provide a minimum level of service on every XG-PON frame and this is achieved by a combination of status reporting and traffic monitoring techniques. Our simulation results show that the utilization of the proposed algorithm accomplishes low and bounded latency and jitter values over a range of traffic loads, and that it also results in a fair bandwidth distribution amongst ONUs irrespective of their spatial separation.