SDN Based Mechanism for Handling Local Traffic over EPON

The software-defined networking (SDN) provides single-point management to the networks and become a popular approach to implement networks. The SDN separates the data plane from the control plane therefore, the network devices simply deliver the data flowed by the control table. The Ethernet passive optical network (EPON) is one of the popular optical access networks deployed worldwide. The optical line terminal (OLT) may have multiple ports, which each port can support up to 256 optical network units (ONUs), as a result, the OLT supports up to thousands of ONUs. In this paper, the SDN based OLT and ONU architecture is proposed to split control and data plane in the EPON by use of OpenFlow protocol. The new functions are implemented in the reconciliation sub-layer to handle SDN operations. Moreover, the proposed architecture enables a new mechanism to handle intra-traffic between ONUs in the optical distributed network (ODN) or between ONUs in different ODNs. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism significantly improves the EPON system performance.