Quality of service in Ethernet passive optical networks

Ethernet passive optical networks (EPON) are fast emerging as the premiere ultra-broadband access solution and offer much-increased scalability and lower cost. Today, quality of service (QoS) provisioning within EPON domains is a major focus, and various dynamic bandwidth allocation (DBA) schemes have been developed using frame-based transmission. However, these schemes largely focus on optical line terminal (OLT) capacity allocation amongst multiple optical node units (ONU). The further issue of intra-ONU bandwidth allocation is a key concern. In this work, the inter/intra-ONU bandwidth allocation issue is treated under the broader packet scheduling framework. In particular, a novel hierarchical framework is developed and related end-to-end delay performance studied.