PON bandwidth resource sharing schemes in a multi-operator scenario

Passive optical network (PON) deployment requires significant capital and operational costs for operators to provide high network capacity and significant geographic coverage. Network sharing is desirable for operators to reduce the investment needed to deploy and operate PON networks. In this paper, we introduce a bandwidth resource sharing framework for XG-PONs among multiple operators. In this framework, each transmission convergence (TC) frame with fixed time slots (125us) is regarded as a bandwidth slice. We proposed two slice scheduling schemes for network infrastructure provider to assign slices to different operators. Our proposed scheme meets three key requirements of network virtualization: isolation, customization and efficient resource utilization. We analyze the details of this scheme and provide discrete event simulation results to support the analysis. Results show the efficacy in isolation and resource utilization and the flexibility of running different customized algorithms within slices on the same shared network equipment.