A new approach to the design of MAC protocols for WDM-EPONs

Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols for WDM Ethernet passive optical networks (WDM-EPONs) suffer from low performance when the users´ round trip times are different. In this paper a new MAC protocol for WDM-EPONs is introduced which overcomes the above limitation by filling the gaps in the scheduling program. Moreover, the proposed scheme favors the requests that present a burst-like behavior, by altering the nodes´ service order in such a way that further eliminating the aforementioned gaps. The performance of the proposed scheme is being studied via simulation results which indicate that it achieves a significantly lower delay and packet loss ratio in relation to the well-known WDM IPACT protocol.