Patent ID: 7379676

Claim:
A communication apparatus comprising: an emulation sublayer, which extracts logical link identification (LLID) information from a preamble included in a frame; a passive optical network (PON) bridge sublayer, which creates and manages a filtering address table for a destination media access control (MAC) address and a virtual LAN (VLAN) ID in response to the LLID information, determines whether to forward the frame to the upper layer of the PON bridge sublayer or to reflect the frame toward an optical network unit (ONU), and provides point-to-point communications between a plurality of ONUs connected to the EPON and VLAN multicasting; and a PON-MAC control sublayer, which is connected to the upper layer of the PON bridge sublayer and performs bandwidth assignment, scheduling, and MAC control; and a MAC sublayer, which is connected between the PON-MAC control sublayer and the emulation sublayer, performs, in a downstream direction, frame check sequence (FCS) creation and inter frame gap (IFG) insertion with respect to multi-point control protocol (MPCP) control frames among frames received from the PON-MAC control sublayer, and management information base (MIB) counter management with respect to downstream frames, and performs, in an upstream direction, a FCS test, address filtering, and MIB counter management with respect to the upstream frames.