  Passive optical networks are increasingly used for access to the Internet and
it is important to understand the performance of future long-reach,
multi-channel variants. In this paper we discuss requirements on the dynamic
bandwidth allocation (DBA) algorithm used to manage the upstream resource in a
WDM EPON and propose a simple novel DBA algorithm that is considerably more
efficient than classical approaches. We demonstrate that the algorithm emulates
a multi-server polling system and derive capacity formulas that are valid for
general traffic processes. We evaluate delay performance by simulation
demonstrating the superiority of the proposed scheduler. The proposed scheduler
offers considerable flexibility and is particularly efficient in long-reach
access networks where propagation times are high.
