Raspberry Pi as Reconfigurable Fiber-based Router and Its Performance Analysis

Abstract

Passive Optical Network (PON) has evolved drastically in order to provide greater speed and better reliability such as Next Generation PON1 (NG-PON1) and NG-PON2 which able to provide more than 40 Gbps and 128 Gbps of bandwidth respectively. Due to rapid growth of PON technologies, researchers have conducted many thorough experiments in order to enhance current PON-base technologies in a form of testbeds. However, most of the studies show that the testbeds have limitations either on its configurability, compactness or cost-efficiency. Hence, this motivates us to propose a lab-scale router testbed in PON architecture by using Raspberry Pi for its promising features and size. The experiments were done in a lab-scale area because the proposed router testbed is to provide a proof-of-concept solution of a reconfigurability router in PON. The results of the experiments are in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay and jitter for both downstream and upstream transmissions. After conducting the experiments, we have come to a conclusion that Raspberry Pis are suitable to be used as lab-scale routers in fiber networking architectures due to their reconfigurability, open source kernel, space-friendly and cost-efficient.