An equivalent circuit rate-based study of next-generation optical access architectures

In this paper we report the results of our first attempt to quantify a bandwidth requirement for next-generation optical access architectures based on passive optical network (PON) technology. It has been well known that shared architectures can enjoy statistical multiplexing gain, but the amount of the gain is highly dependent upon the nature of traffic, network architectures, and so on. To take into account the interactive nature of actual traffic (e.g., TCP flow control) and the performances perceived by end-users (e.g., delay in web browsing) in quantification of the statistical multiplexing gain, we use the equivalent circuit rate (ECR) as an analysis framework and a behavioral model for web browsing as a user traffic model in the simulation, which is implemented using OMNeT++ with INET framework providing models for the complete Internet protocol stack. The simulation results for the abstract models of various PON-based architectures have shown that, among shared architectures, a hybrid time division multiplexing (TDM)/wavelength division multiplexing (WDM)-PON with a feeder rate several times higher than a distribution rate can provide the same user-perceived performance as a dedicated network architecture with the same line rate as the distribution rate --- i.e., point-to-point network or a pure WDM-PON --- for a reasonable range of input load.