In this paper, we investigate the packet delay distribution of a dynamic bandwidth allocation(DBA) scheme in an Ethernet passive optical network(EPON). We focus on the gated-exhaustive vacation system. We assume that input packets arrive at an optical network unit(ONU) according to general interarrival distribution. We use a discrete time queueing model in order to find the packet delay distribution of the gated-exhaustive system with the primary transmission queue and the secondary input queue. We give some numerical examples to investigate the mean packet delays of the proposed queueing model to analyze the DBA scheme in an EPON.