Discovery process for emerging 10 Gb/s EPONs

Analysis of the techno-economic conditions warranting currently existing deployments of 1 Gb/s (1G) Ethernet passive optical networks indicates clearly the requirement for a support of legacy equipment, allowing carriers to take advantage of already deployed 1G ONUs while increasing the channel capacity for some customers. This calls for a complete coexistence of 1G and 10 Gb/s (10G) equipment, sharing the same physical PON plant. In order to achieve this, a number of technical issues must be resolved in a satisfactory manner, including the required extensions of the discovery process, currently specified in Clause 64 of IEEE 802.3-2008. In this article we present the existing discovery process for 1G-EPON systems and propose a series of extensions required to support the extended discovery process, which include detection of the upstream and downstream data rates, as well as an extension of the existing registration handshake.