Performances of differentiated services in the upstream transmission of Ethernet passive optical network (E-PON) are affected by bandwidth reservation algorithm of an optical network unit, since data packets can be transmitted to an optical line termination only during the reserved transmission window. The effects of time-slot reservation on differentiated services are analysed and an adaptive class-based excess bandwidth reservation algorithm, called service quality pre-engagement (SQP), which reserves a time-slot based on the backlog queue and traffic arrival pattern of class is proposed. SQP applies the prediction-based bandwidth reservation to selected forward reservation classes (FRCs) which are determined by the introduced dynamic FRC selection. The proposed short-term service work-based time-slot reservation and long-term adaptive FRC selection optimise time-slot reservation according to traffic load of class. Analytic and simulation results show that this approach improves the performance of differentiated services, especially in terms of system buffer size, light-load penalty and service fairness, while guaranteeing high link utilisation and throughput.