A novel traffic-aware mechanism for energy-saving at the OLT in WDM/TDM-PON

Even if Passive Optical Networks (PONs) have proven to be more energy-efficient that other access solutions, energy consumption minimization is becoming an important research target also in PON. In particular, to sustain the increased bandwidth demand of emerging applications in the access section of the network, new hybrid PON solutions employing WDM/TDM are being investigated. Compared with classics PON, the architecture of WDM/TDM-PONs requires more transceivers/receivers, hence they are expected to be more energy hungry than classical PONs. In this paper, we focus on the power consumption minimization in WDM/TDM-PONs and we propose an energy-efficient mechanism based on Dynamic Bandwidth and Wavelength Allocation whose objective is to switch off, whenever possible, the unnecessary receivers for upstream traffic at the Optical Line Terminal (OLT). Our proposed energy saving mechanism is able to decrease energy consumption at the OLT of about 30%, while maintaining the penalty introduced in terms of channel utilization and packet delay within an acceptable range. Detailed implementation of the proposed algorithm is presented, and simulation results are reported to quantify energy savings and effects on network performance on different network scenarios.