Multiple access ethernet passive optical network testbed

A multiple access Ethernet Passive Optical Network (EPON) testbed is proposed to provide a platform for testing and evaluating bandwidth allocation models. A few commercial and open source network simulators are available for EPON study but it does not take into account the real environment parameters and relatively difficult to configure. This paper proposes a simple effective EPON emulator testbed using several personal computers networked together that acts as EPON devices individually using Prolog. The testbed is a reprogrammable platform, enabling the testing of protocol for the EPON environment. A Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation (DBA) study was made for the EPON upstream traffic management using the emulator to illustrate its functionality. The design parameters studied are the offered load, amount of requested bandwidth for each type of traffic and the bandwidth allocated for the respective traffic type.