Demonstration of Fully Softwarized 10G-EPON PHY Processing on a General-Purpose Server for Flexible Access Systems

Abstract

Network requirements continue to expand, and flexible network deployment by utilizing software defined networks (SDNs) and network function virtualization (NFV) technology is a crucial subject. In order to maximize the advantages of NFV/SDN, we aim at expanding the software-defined region of optical line terminals (OLTs) by focusing on physical-layer (PHY) functions for the flexible access system architecture (FASA). While conventional studies limit the range of the softwarized region to upper layer processes, this article softwarizes both upstream and downstream PHY functions on a general-purpose server in real time, and, for the first time, introduces measured performance attributes including delay and throughput. We built a 10G service network interface (SNI) using multi-threaded processing and realized high multi-stream processing by using multiple-dimension buffers. The results gained from our demonstration system confirm throughput of 8.7 Gbps, which is the theoretical limit of 10G-EPON, and while satisfying the theoretical performance of FEC.