10G EPON vs. XG-PON1 efficiency

10G EPON and XG-PON1 are both recently standardized but emerging technologies, ready to replace their less capacitive predecessors, 1G EPON and GPON respectively. Both technologies offer row bit rate of 10 Gbps on downlink, but are based on significantly different signal processing principles and protocol stack's characteristics. According to these principles, different technologies introduce different amount and types of transmission overhead, which must be transmitted along with the useful information (in order to provide network functionality). While these overheads drastically reduce real available bit rates to the end users, it is of the great interest to estimate these overheads with high accuracy. Accordingly, in this paper, entire overhead (including PHY and MAC layers' overheads) introduced by 10G EPON and XG-PON1 technologies is estimated through their corresponding protocol stack analysis. Based on these estimations, final conclusions about 10G EPON and XG-PON1 efficiency and thus maximum real achievable data rates are derived. This enables network operators to make appropriate decision when choosing between the two concurrent technologies.