Bandwidth Resource Sharing on the XG-PON Transmission Convergence Layer in a Multi-operator Scenario

Passive optical networks (PONs) offer high network capacity and densified coverage at the cost of high capital expenditure. Therefore, it is desirable for network operators who deploy their own infrastructures to share their PON infrastructures to reduce the initial investment. The key problem of PON network sharing is how to balance the trade-off between isolation and utilization of bandwidth resources. In this paper, we introduce a bandwidth resource-sharing framework in XG-PONs (10 gigabit-capable PONs) among multiple operators. In this framework, each transmission convergence (TC) frame with fixed time slots (125 μs) is regarded as a bandwidth slice, which is the resource granularity for sharing. Then, we formulate the bandwidth resource-sharing problem and propose slice scheduling schemes to assign bandwidth slices to different operators. Our proposed schemes meet three key requirements of network sharing: isolation, customization, and efficient resource utilization. We study the efficacy of our schemes by employing an event-driven simulator. The results show our schemes could ensure resource isolation across operators and maximize total resource utilization while providing the flexibility of running different customized algorithms to different operators.