Supporting triple-play services with private networking over WDM EPONs

The recent high-bandwidth demand multimedia applications have driven the need for higher bandwidth and faster access network architecture. However, conventional single-channel Ethernet Passive Optical Networks (EPONs) cannot fully realize and satisfy the multimedia demands. Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) EPON is one of the best solutions for supporting the converged triple-play services such as VoIP, video streaming, and Internet access traffic. On the other hand, due to the growing popularity of point-to-point communications within Local Area Network (LAN), the support of point-to-point communications is essential in any future network access solution. Thus, the current study proposes a Frame-based QoS provisioning Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation (FQ-DBA) scheme applied to an Arrayed- Waveguide-Grating (AWG) based WDM EPON network to provide efficient triple-play service transmission in all directions, i.e., regardless of the destination of the data packet as within or beyond the current access network. In FQ-DBA, the time domains of all upstream wavelengths are synchronously partitioned to continuous frames having fixed length. Each Optical Network Unit (ONU) is guaranteed sufficient network resources to support traffic transmissions in all directions for each fixed-length frame. Meanwhile, FQ-DBA can maximize bandwidth utilization effectively by applying interleaving. A series of comparisons between the numerical results are performed to show the validity of the proposed FQ-DBA DBA scheme.