Advanced link and transport control protocols for broadband optical access networks

The objective of this dissertation is to improve the service quality of broadband optical access networks by developing advanced link- and transport- layer protocols. Current access technologies represent a significant bottleneck in bandwidth and service quality between a high-speed residential/enterprise network and a largely overbuilt core network. Although it is believed that passive optical network (PON) will be the most promising solution to provide truly broadband connections to end users, a suit of protocols are required to provide quality of service (QoS). In this dissertation, we design a new reservation MAC scheme that arbitrates upstream transmission, prevents collisions, and varies bandwidth according to demand and priority. The new access scheme exploits both WDM and TDM to cater for both light and heavy bandwidth requirements. Next, we introduce delta compression as an efficient method for fast content download. In the third part of this dissertation, we enhance the transport performance of Ethernet services by addressing the throughput optimization issue at the edge of the network. A novel SLA-aware transport control scheme is proposed to utilize reserved bandwidth more efficiently using a shifted additive increase multiplicative decrease (AIMD) algorithm, and to detect congestion more accurately based on hypothesis test. The performance of the proposed scheme is compared with traditional TCP through theoretical analyses and simulations.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Chang, Gee-Kung; Committee Member: Ammar, Mostafa; Committee Member: Copeland, John; Committee Member: Ingram, Mary Ann; Committee Member: Riley, George; Committee Member: Zhou, G.Ton