The long-term evolution–gigabit Ethernet passive optical network (LTE-GEPON) integrates two recent communication technologies: a fixed broadband service and a high-bandwidth wireless service. Both networks support quality of service (QoS) so that high-priority packets such as voice and video can be delivered in real time. Thus, a requirement of such a converged network is to support QoS.

The main problem in the converged network is efficient and fair bandwidth resource allocation to end users who use heterogeneous networks to support QoS. Well-known algorithms for resource allocation exist, and two are compared with the authors’ approach in this paper. However, the two existing algorithms allocate the requested bandwidth without consideration of the different channel qualities between wired and wireless users.

The contribution of this paper is its proposal of an efficient bandwidth allocation algorithm that considers heterogeneous end users to support efficient QoS. The approach of this paper is to separate a queue into two subqueues for wired and wireless end users. A GEPON node observes the traffic from all connected LTE network nodes in the current cycle and forecasts the requested bandwidth in the next cycle to determine the allocation for each subqueue. The forecast is added to a wireless end user’s requested bandwidth “to guarantee the bit rates and other QoS requirements” for both wired and wireless end users.

The proposed algorithm outperforms existing algorithms in terms of delay and jitter. It is practical because it does not change the current standards very much. The performance improvement comes from the accuracy of the forecast; that is, the traffic pattern does not change very much between cycles. Thus, experiments with more dynamic traffic patterns will also be interesting.