Backhauling mobile systems with XG-PON using grouped assured bandwidth

Backhauling base stations with Passive Optical Networks (PONs) besides bringing a new revenue source for the PON operator, can reduce the cost of installing new base stations for the mobile operator since a new, dedicated, backhaul can be avoided. If mobile operators have more than one base station on the PON, they might be interested in assuring bandwidth to a group of base stations as opposed to assuring bandwidth to each base station individually. This gives the mobile operator the ability to make use of the properties of statistical multiplexing to require smaller amount of bandwidth to serve its base stations adequately. We discuss this new concept of Group Assured Bandwidth and its advantages for different types of traffic. In order to be able to assign group assured bandwidth, we propose the group-GIANT (gGIANT) scheduler for 10-gigabit-capable Passive Optical Network (XG-PON), a state of the art standard for PONs. Through a simulative study, it is shown that using group assured bandwidth can improve the performance of the network in terms of average delay and lost packets, especially when the traffic load from the base stations has an heterogeneous nature.