Integrated dynamic bandwidth allocation for low buffer aggregated passive optical network systems

The relentless increase in network capacity is making it important to reduce power consumption. In optical access network systems, the buffer size in layer-2 switches, which aggregate multiple passive optical network systems, is expanding as the network speed increases, and the buffer is now significant in terms of power consumption. An effective way to reduce the buffer size is to adopt dynamic bandwidth allocation for a layer-2 switch; however, this leads to low bandwidth efficiency. In this paper, we propose a dynamic bandwidth allocation framework that is suitable for application to a layer-2 switch. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated by both computer simulations and experiments, and it is shown that the proposed scheme provides better performance than the conventional scheme with regard to buffer size with high bandwidth efficiency.