A novel medium access control protocol for passive optical network supporting local area networking capabilities

An alternate solution for Ethernet passive optical networks (EPON) providing local area networking (LAN) capabilities is proposed in this article. Our solution adopts a star coupler-based PON architecture and uses radio frequency subcarrier multiplexed transmission for the LAN traffic delivery. The proposed medium access control (MAC) protocol supports a fully distributed control plane among the optical network units (ONUs) for ONU---ONU communication as well as upstream access to the OLT. The simulation results indicate that the proposed MAC protocol outperforms the others in terms of the average packet end-to-end delay, especially for LAN traffic.