A Hybrid Upstream Bandwidth Allocation Method for Multimedia Communications in EPONs

The Ethernet Passive Optical Network (EPON) has been considered to be one of the most promising solutions for the implementation of the Fiber To The Home (FTTH) technology designed to ameliorate the "last mile" bandwidth bottleneck. In the EPON network, an efficient and fair bandwidth allocation is a very important issue, since multiple optical network units (ONUs) share a common upstream channel for packet transmission. To increase bandwidth utilization, an EPON system must provide a way to adaptively allocate the upstream bandwidth among multiple ONUs in accordance to their bandwidth demands and requirements. We present a new hybrid method that satisfies these requirements. The advantage of our method comes from the consideration of application-specific bandwidth allocation and the minimization of the idle bandwidth. Our simulation results show that our proposed method outperforms existing dynamic bandwidth allocation methods in terms of bandwidth utilization.