IPACT with Grant Estimation for EPON

Interleaved polling with adaptive cycle time (IPACT) has great significance in the Ethernet passive optical network (EPON), which is regarded as one of the best choices for next generation access networks. In this paper, we propose an estimation-based scheme, IPACT with grant estimation (IPACT-GE), to improve the performance of the IPACT. By estimating the amount of new packets arriving in one polling cycles and granting transmission windows to ONUs based on the estimation, the proposed scheme can provide a shorter waiting delay for the packets and less buffer occupancy than those of the IPACT scheme at the light traffic load so that the light load penalty could be greatly mitigated when combined with the strict priority queue (SPQ) mechanism to provide the differentiated services