A distributed FIFO spacer/multiplexer for access to tree APONs

To bring costs down and make B-ISDN attractive to residential and small businesses from an early stage, cost reductions are necessary. The ATM passive optical networks (APONs) are promising in that respect presenting high reliability, robustness and upgradability. When TDMA (time division multiple access) is employed a medium access control (MAC) protocol is needed to effect bandwidth sharing. However known protocols increase the cell delay variation (CDV) too much over that of an equivalent ordinary ATM multiplexing stage thus producing traffic which creates serious complications to connection acceptance and policing functions of ATM networks. The protocol presented in this paper reduces the CDV to ordinary levels while at the same time operating in a complementary yet decoupled way from the ATM network functions