A New Media Access Control Protocol with Quality of Service and Fairness Guarantee in Ethernet-based Passive Optical Networks

We propose a new Ethernet-based Passive Optical Network (EPON) media access control (MAC) protocol that supports quality of service (QoS) and guarantees fairness among users. For QoS support the proposed MAC protocol minimizes packet delays and delay variations for the higher priority traffic, while increases throughput efficiency for the best effort traffic by appropriate reclassification of incoming traffic to take advantage of the available bandwidth in the guaranteed time slots. Fairness is guaranteed by dynamically allocating the bandwidth according to users' subscription rates. Through simulation experiments we have verified that compared to the existing EPON MAC protocol, the proposed MAC protocol reduces packet delays and packet delay variations for higher priority traffic and enhances the overall throughput by reclassifying the incoming traffic. We have also shown that the proposed MAC protocol effectively prevents malicious users from hogging bandwidth, thereby guaranteeing fair bandwidth allocation among users.