Resource Allocation Strategies for Multimedia Traffic in an ATM-based PON

Abstract

The provision of multimedia services to a large customer base is considered, over an ATM-based Passive Optical Network (PON). A distributed and hierarchical decision making architecture is defined, based on the physical system organization, where the Optical Access Units (ONU) and the Optical Line Termination (OlT) operate jointly, in order to make the best possible use of the transport capacity of the access network, while at the same time maintaining the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of different users and service classes. In this framework, bandwidth allocation and admission control functions, in both directions of flow, are investigated, with the aim of defining management and control laws and algorithms that achieve the above goals. At the same time, the control architecture also reflects the multilayer hierarchy introduced by the presence of multiple teletraffic time scales, by essentially decoupling the problem of ensuring QoS at the cell-level, at least for connection-oriented traffic (cell loss probability, cell transfer delay). The models, the cost functions and the control strategies used in the parametric optimization are described, and numerical results are reported and discussed.