Ethernet Passive Optical Network (EPON) Educational Module for Engineering Postgraduate Students

The most effective solution to cope with the ever increasing bandwidth demands is by using Ethernet Passive Optical Network (EPON). Thus, there are needs in introducing an EPON subject for Engineering Postgraduate students. However, since networking is a subject that is not easy to visualize, the lack of means to illustrate or convey the EPON network causes an apparent lack of interest amongst engineering students towards the discipline. In order to overcome these problems, a need to develop an educational module for the EPON system is seen. In this paper, an EPON testbed is proposed together with a friendly graphical user interface (GUI) as a tool for the postgraduate engineering subject to better understand the protocol and the bandwidth allocation studies of EPON.  The details of the testbed and the preparation stages to make it an educational module are also demonstrated together with results to assist engineering postgraduate students to better understand the subject matters.