White Paper

Bandwidth Control in
GPON Networks

GPON offers a major leap in bandwidth. However, the

continual addition of high-bandwidth services and
subscribers will eventually exhaust the available
bandwidth, and introduce the need to control its allocation.
Bandwidth controls become crucial in guaranteeing the
delivery of services. The GPON standard specifies
upstream bandwidth control with DBA, however, no
downstream bandwidth controls are defined. This
omission is the cause of significant differences in
performance across GPON implementations.
Figure 1 Conventional Single Bridge Port OLT
This whitepaper analyzes the requirements for bandwidth
control in a GPON network, and how the conventional
approach to bandwidth control in Access networks is
inadequate in PON networks. It then describes NEC’s
solution to controlling bandwidth in GPON, both upstream ONT
and downstream, and how the proposed solution Bridge port
Scheduler
improves traffic control and forwarding efficiency.
ONT Bridge port

Bridge port
Conventional Single Bridge Port OLT ONT

At a minimum in the Access network bandwidth must be

controllable at a subscriber level, so there is fair sharing
between subscribers. In traditional point-to-point networks
such as in DSL, the physical port is dedicated and directly
connected to a subscriber. The IP DSLAM’s central
Ethernet bridge has a bridge port assigned to each
physical port, with the Ethernet bridge forwarding and
scheduling traffic between bridge ports. However, a PON
network is very different as there are multiple ONTs, i.e.
subscribers, connected to a physical OLT port. In the
downstream direction a single bridge port OLT is unable
to distinguish traffic to each ONT, see Figure 1, With the
Ethernet bridge unable to schedule traffic between the
ONTs, there can be no guaranteed downstream
bandwidth. The downstream scheduling is done on a
First-In First-Out (FIFO) basis with only best-effort service
guarantees
One proposed model is to assign subscribers and/or
Services to dedicated VLANs and to control traffic with
VLAN policers/shapers. Although it limits bandwidth, it
can not guarantee bandwidth and still has severe fairness
issues.
Figure 2 Multi-Bridge Port OLT
Multiple Bridge Port OLT
To achieve subscriber level bandwidth control it is
necessary to create multiple virtualized bridge ports at the
OLT port, i.e. a bridge port instance for each ONT, see
Figure 2. Upstream traffic from an ONT is mapped via its
GEM-ID to its own bridge port in the OLT, downstream
the traffic is forwarded to the bridge port via MAC learning.
A traffic scheduler between bridge ports guarantees
subscribers fair access to bandwidth. Having control over
the bandwidth allocation an operator can begin to create
bandwidth guaranteed services, i.e. Business-grade
Service Level Agreements and ‘All you can eat’
residential plans, a combination of guaranteed and non-
guaranteed bandwidth sharing.
In addition to subscriber level control, a further level of
bandwidth control is at the service level, so that
bandwidth can be guaranteed for each service. This fine
granularity bandwidth control is required in today’s multi-
service networks. Using a flexible mapping to GEM-IDs
individual ONTs, ONT ports, and services, can be

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 Bandwidth Control in GPON Networks

mapped to their own bridge ports. This gives an operator

unprecedented traffic control, being able to define
classification and filtering rules for each subscriber on the
network. Bridge ports may be created for specific traffic
flows, e.g. multicast flows with their own traffic shapers
and traffic scheduling.
Example Configuration
Figure 3 is an example of a typical GPON network
configuration. A network may have a mixture of single
subscriber ONTs and multi-dwelling ONUs. ONUs are
mini-DSLAMs hidden behind a PON interface, and ONTs
are single subscriber CPEs. For bandwidth scheduling the
ONUs are allocated their own bridge port and for the
ONTs each subscriber UNI port is allocated to a bridge
port. The downstream scheduler at the OLT can be
weighted between ONUs and ONTs, with a higher
proportion going to the multi-dwelling ONUs. In this way
bandwidth is allocated fairly between subscribers
regardless if connected to an ONU or ONT. Where there
are subscribers with a number of higher bandwidth
services, e.g. multiple STBs, bandwidth can be weighted
towards specific UNI ports on the ONT.
Multiple Bridge Traffic Forwarding
The conventional single bridge port OLT is unaware of
the ONTs on the PON when forwarding (bridging) traffic.
All upstream Broadcast and Flood traffic must be
broadcast back downstream the PON port, as there is
only a single bridge port for MAC learning and VLAN
memberships. Whereas, the multiple bridge port OLT is
aware of each ONT on the PON and its VLAN
membership. The OLT can intelligently forward traffic,
eliminating any unnecessary flooding of traffic back down
to the PON, see Figure 4. This eliminates flooding in
point-to-point (1:1) VLANs. For shared (N:1) VLANs
secure traffic segregation can be implemented with full
knowledge of those ONTs within a Private VLAN that
should not communicate with each other.
For improve security each bridge port can be uniquely
configured with MAC and IP address spoofing controls,
which is not possible in the conventional single bridge
port OLT.

ONT #1
Port #1

ONT #1 ONT #1
Port #2
Scheduler
ONT #2
Port #1
ONT #2
ONT #2
Port #2

ONU ONU

IGMP-
Multicast
proxy Figure 4 Traffic forwarding with multiple bridge ports

Figure 3 Example configuration

Multicast traffic can have its own GEM-ID for efficient
Single-copy broadcasting to all subscribers. This GEM-ID
is mapped to its own bridge port so that the level of
downstream multicast traffic can be controlled. The IGMP
proxying function will receive multicast joins on individual
bridge ports but the single-copy multicast bridge port will
join the multicast group. IGMP snooping/proxying at the
OLT is beneficial in aggregating the channel requests
from all the ONTs on the PON.
Conclusions
Upstream and downstream bandwidth controls are
required for guaranteeing service delivery. This
whitepaper has highlighted the deficiencies with single
bridge port OLTs in controlling bandwidth between ONTs.
For the necessary fine-grain bandwidth controls required
in GPON a multiple bridge port OLT is needed. NEC’s
GPON OLT has been specifically designed as a multiple
bridge port OLT to meet these requirements.

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availability.

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