Frame Level Sharing for DBA virtualization in multi-tenant PONs

The worldwide installation of Fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) access network solutions is hindered by the high upfront cost of deploying ubiquitous fiber infrastructure. While passive optical networks can provide lower cost compared to point-to-point solutions, their total cost of ownership is still high for most operators to justify a mass scale deployment. Sharing passive optical network (PON) infrastructure has thus been proposed as a solution for network operators to reduce the cost of running FTTP services. In addition, the ability for operators to offer business services (including for example mobile backhaul) in addition to residential services, is crucial to increase the overall PON network revenue. However running services with highly diverse requirements over a physical infrastructure shared among multiple operators (which we now refer to as virtual network operators -VNOs) requires VNOs to have a tight control over PON capacity scheduling. In this paper, we introduce a novel upstream PON capacity sharing algorithm called Frame Level Sharing (FLS). FLS is based on the idea of virtual Dynamic Bandwidth Assignment (vDBA), and allows sharing the upstream frame among multiple VNOs to maximize bandwidth utilization, minimize latency, and provide a high level of service isolation among the VNOs sharing the PON. Our simulation results show that FLS outperforms other benchmark algorithms proposed in the literature.