Multicast polling for 10G-EPON

A multicast polling scheme is proposed for 10G Ethernet passive optical networks (10G-EPONs). In the multicast polling scheme, the GATE message is broadcast to all ONUs with a new op-code of 0007. Comparing the proposed multicasting with the traditional unicasting scheme, the downstream bandwidth consumption for the control packet of the multicast is 0.011% compared with the unicast of 0.11% at the cycle time of 2ms. As a result of the upstream performance, the channel utilisation improves 3% and the saturation offered load of the end-to-end delay for the multicast and the unicast is 0.8 and 0.7, respectively.