Programmable bandwidth management in software-defined EPON architecture

•We propose a software-defined EPON with programmable bandwidth management.•We take reprogrammable DBA module instead of the hardware-based one.•We investigate bandwidth allocation mechanism to apply customized DBA for each ONU.•A bandwidth management scheme is proposed to manage all the DBA algorithms.

This paper proposes a software-defined EPON architecture which replaces the hardware-implemented DBA module with reprogrammable DBA module. The DBA module allows pluggable bandwidth allocation algorithms among multiple ONUs adaptive to traffic profiles and network states. We also introduce a bandwidth management scheme executed at the controller to manage the customized DBA algorithms for all date queues of ONUs. Our performance investigation verifies the effectiveness of this new EPON architecture, and numerical results show that software-defined EPONs can achieve less traffic delay and provide better support to service differentiation in comparison with traditional EPONs.