icbnet

Special Issue: Broad-band Optical Networks

The cost of a dedicated fiber access to the broadband integrated services digital network (B-ISDN) is too high for small business and residential customers, necessitating some form of resource sharing. Combining asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) over a passive optical network (APON) with a suitable medium access control (MAC) protocol can provide significant cost savings and a reasonable bandwidth. In this way the customer line section can support broadband services at an early stage. The MAC protocol presented in this work places emphasis on service transparency aspects with an aim to incur minimal changes to the local exchange for APON connections. Sharing is effected through a reservation-based time-division multiple-access method. The proposed MAC protocol is characterized by dynamic bandwidth allocation and multiple cell transmissions from each network termination in the upstream direction. This reduces waste due to the unavoidable synchronization preambles and other overhead