Offline and Online Multi-Thread Polling in Long-Reach PONs: A Critical Evaluation

Multi-thread polling (MTP) with offline scheduling and offline excess bandwidth distribution has recently been proposed to overcome the long propagation delay of long-reach passive optical networks (LR-PONs). In this paper, we propose a complementary MTP approach with online scheduling and online excess bandwidth distribution. We evaluate the throughput-delay performance of offline and online MTP against offline and online single-thread polling (STP) with excess bandwidth distribution as well as double-phase polling (DPP) with excess bandwidth distribution. We find that online MTP and STP as well as DPP give significantly lower average packet delays than offline MTP.