Photon Netw Commun (2010) 20:224–231
DOI 10.1007/s11107-010-0263-1
Analysis of upstream link bandwidth utilization in GPON
with integrated network surveillance
Hakjeon Bang · Madhan Thollabandi ·
Sungchang Kim · Dong-Soo Lee · Chang-Soo Park
Received: 9 September 2009 / Accepted: 21 July 2010 / Published online: 6 August 2010
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
Abstract We present a media access control protocol
extension to integrate the physical layer surveillance con-
cept into the transmission and the related management system
in the Gigabit-capable passive optical network (GPON). We
allocate an unused time slot for network surveillance depend-
ing upon its availability in the upstream GPON transmission
convergence frame. We analyze the upstream link bandwidth
utilization of the GPON system with network surveillance
and show that there is a negligible amount of underutiliza-
tion of link bandwidth as a result of this.
Keywords Gigabit-passive optical networks (GPON) ·
Network surveillance · Reflective semiconductor optical
amplifier (RSOA) · Media access control (MAC) protocol ·
Bandwidth allocation
H. Bang · M. Thollabandi · C.-S. Park (B)
Department of Information and Communications,
Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology,
1 Oryong-Dong, Buk-Gu, Gwangju 500-712, Republic of Korea
e-mail: csp@gist.ac.kr
H. Bang
e-mail: starm021@gist.ac.kr
M. Thollabandi
e-mail: madhan@gist.ac.kr
S. Kim · D.-S. Lee
Hanam Center, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute
(ETRI), 1 Oryong-dong, Buk-gu, Gwangju 500-712, Republic of Korea
e-mail: sungchang@etri.re.kr
D.-S. Lee
e-mail: d-soolee@etri.re.kr
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1 Introduction
Gigabit-capable passive optical networks (GPONs) address
the first mile of the communication infrastructure between
service provider central offices and customer sites. With
the expansion of new services offered over the Internet,
a dramatic increase of bandwidth has been facilitated in the
backbone network through the use of wavelength-division
multiplexing (WDM), providing tens of gigabits per sec-
ond per wavelength. At the same time, local area networks
(LANs) are scaled up and are being upgraded. Such growing
gap between the capacity of the backbone network and end
users’ needs results in a serious bottleneck of the access net-
work between them. An access network technology is desired
that can provide low-cost efficient equipment to facilitate
multiservice access to end users. Since GPON is an inexpen-
sive, simple, and scalable technology, and capable of deliv-
ering integrated services, it is considered to be an attractive
and promising solution for the broadband subscriber access
network [1]. Typically, GPON includes an optical line ter-
minal (OLT) residing in the central office (CO) and multi-
ple optical network terminals (ONTs) residing at or near the
customer premises. GPON is typically deployed as a tree
or tree-and-branch topology, using a single, shared optical
fiber, and inexpensive optical splitters which divide the sin-
gle fiber into separate strands feeding individual subscribers.
The OLT is connected to the IP network and backbone of
the network operator. Through this interface, multiple ser-
vices are provided to the access network. GPON is covered
by International Telecommunication Union-Telecommuni-
cation Standardization sector (ITU-T) standard G.984, using
Ethernet, time division multiplexing (TDM), or asynchro-
nous transfer mode (ATM) for data transport.
Beside the investment costs for a new network infra-
structure, the operator has to consider the operational costs
Photon Netw Commun (2010) 20:224–231
Fig. 1 GPON system architecture utilizing upstream data transmission
based on SL-RSOA
as well. In the future, new operations, administration, and
maintenance (OAM) concepts will be necessary to help
the network operator to reduce operational costs and to
improve customer satisfaction. OAM concepts from the leg-
acy copper-based telecom infrastructure and from the optical
network for long haul applications can be adapted to optical
access systems. However, the diversity of different access
network topologies, and a multiple number of optical links,
requires new OAM concepts to fulfill the operators’ needs.
A basic prerequisite for all OAM concepts is knowledge of
the status of all components in the network and continuous
receipt of as much information as possible about the system’s
behavior at any time. Also each monitoring concept has to be
integrated into the transmission system and into the related
management system, whereas the monitoring system must
not affect the transmission characteristics of the transmis-
sion system.
End-to-end monitoring on higher protocol layers is the
solution most often used today to supervise long haul opti-
cal networks as well as metro and access transmission
systems. Bit error rate, frame error rate, loss of synchroniza-
tion, loop back testing, and indirect monitoring from forward
error correction (FEC) and the transmission control protocol
(TCP) are used to assess the transmission quality. In opti-
cal access networks, this information is used to maintain
the network. A main drawback of using monitoring func-
tions on higher layers is that the transmission quality already
is affected before an alarm appears and also none of these
parameters provide a view into the root cause of a prob-
lem on the physical layer. Preventive maintenance is not in
place at present because cost effective solutions are not avail-
able. Rigorous discussion on how today’s supervision func-
tions operate and why monitoring functions on the physical
layer are more useful than monitoring on higher layers can
be found else where [2]. Hence real-time physical layer mon-
itoring is extremely important to support service level agree-
ments (SLA) and to guarantee network reliability [3]. Several
non-intrusive fiber surveillance techniques were proposed in
the literature, including an in-service surveillance technique
225
based on spectral analysis of cavity mode frequency formed
by external cavity of self-injection locked Fabry–Perot laser
diode (FP-LD) [4]. This scheme, however, requires a sep-
arate out-of-band wavelength for network surveillance and
also needs an additional FP-LD at each ONU to generate
the surveillance signal. To alleviate the system cost involved
in network surveillance, an in-service surveillance technique
based on cavity mode analysis of self-injection locked reflec-
tive semiconductor optical amplifier (SL-RSOA) was studied
[5]. As shown in Fig. 1, this configuration can simultaneously
generate the upstream data signal as well as a distinct cav-
ity mode frequency (surveillance signal) due to the presence
of external cavity at each ONU. Thereby supporting simul-
taneous detection of upstream data signal and surveillance
signal at the OLT. This configuration, however, had compat-
ibility problems with the existing GPON standard because
the media access control (MAC) protocol of GPON restrains
the individual ONUs from transmission of surveillance sig-
nals outside their allocated time slot, as it might cause severe
power penalty on the upstream data channel. In configuration
[6], we investigated the provisioning of separate unused time
slot in the upstream GPON transmission convergence (GTC)
frame for network surveillance without modifying the GPON
frame structure and demonstrated the feasibility of the pro-
posed surveillance scheme in GPON. In this article, we evalu-
ate the network performance by modelling the upstream link
bandwidth utilization with network surveillance and analyze
the scheduling issues regarding the network surveillance. We
then propose an algorithm to dynamically evaluate the spare
bandwidth availability in the upstream GTC frame and allo-
cate it for network surveillance, if sufficient enough. Fur-
thermore, depending upon the average requested bandwidth
by ONUs, we derived an empirical formula to compute the
upper bound on the delay experienced in provisioning the
unused bandwidth for network surveillance. Finally, we give
a comparative analysis of link bandwidth utilization at differ-
ent bandwidth allocation rates for network surveillance and
show that there is negligible degradation in network perfor-
mance as a result of network surveillance.
2 Integration of network surveillance in GPON
through MAC protocol extension
Physical layer testing and supervision functions will be an
integral part of transmission systems in the future. The inte-
gration of supervision functions into the optical transceiver
module enables a very cost effective way to monitor phys-
ical layer parameters. The existing OAM protocols of the
transmission systems will be used to transmit control infor-
mation for the measurement as well as the results of the
measurement itself. The network information is stored in
the management information base (MIB) of the OLT and
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