Design of the MAC frame structure regardless of contention in ATM-PON

A common broadband PON applicable to many operators increases the world-wide market for the product. Multiplexing of data from the customer into the network is done passively on the PON. PONs offer a flexible future proof service delivery platform for the access network. The MAC (medium access control) protocol controls ONU (optical network unit) access to the shared capacity on the PON, this protocol is very important if TDMA (time division multiple access) multiplexing is used on the upstream. The MAC protocol must be efficient because the PON capacity is shared. Dynamic allocation of bandwidth to active ONUs enables higher efficiency than if the capacity is fixed at call set-up. Many MAC protocols operating as collison-free and collison-based protocols have been proposed and are now proposed. Therefore there are many kinds of protocol and data frame that are transmitted between OLT (optical line termination) and ONUs. If the network operator which manages OLT supports many types of protocol at ONUs, the network operator can support these. In this paper, the MAC frame structure offers the flexibility to cope with different physical layer specifications. At the same time it offers the possibility of implementing a variety of media access protocols so that a variety of services can be supported. This frame guarantees the operation of various protocols at ONUs using a key-set that has variable fields