Adapting the EPON MAC protocol to a metropolitan burst switching network

Abstract

This paper compares the respective efficiencies of the control and the management planes in performing resource allocation for TWIN (Time-domain Wavelength Interleaved Networking) optical networks used to aggregate and distribute traffic within a metropolitan area. While the Management Plane driven MAC (MP-MAC) protocol is based on an quasi-static configuration derived from optimization model, the Control Plane driven MAC (CP-MAC) protocol is based on adapting Passive Optical Network (PON) upstream traffic control, originally designed to access network, to the metropolitan network. The performance levels delivered by both approaches are compared by simulating a TWIN network applied to a Multi-hEad sub-wavElength swiTching (MEET) architecture that ensures an all optical aggregation between the regional metropolitan and the core networks. The simulation assesses the QoS delivered to three different classes of service, for a packet level traffic trace obtained from an operational network.