Patent ID: 7609720

Claim:
A bandwidth allocation equipment in an optical line terminal which allocates bandwidth for data to be transmitted from a plurality of optical network units through an optical splitter, said equipment comprising: a transmit/receive unit that receives an output request for requesting bandwidth allocation to the data from the respective optical network units, and sends back a signal sending permission to the respective optical network units for specifying bandwidth to be allowed for transmitting the data in each service cycle as a unit period for the data transmission; and a plurality of bandwidth allocation units, each bandwidth allocation unit is provided with corresponding to the optical network unit for performing bandwidth allocation processing in accordance with the output request for the data to be transmitted from the corresponding optical network unit, and each of bandwidth allocation units are connected to one another in a ring to perform the bandwidth allocation processing one by one for corresponding optical network unit, and outputs the signal sending permission to the transmit/receive unit from the bandwidth allocation unit that has performed the last bandwidth allocation processing in the ring connection, wherein, said transmit/receive unit specifies the bandwidth allocation unit that performs the first bandwidth allocation processing by shifting the bandwidth allocation unit one by one for each of the service cycles.