Grant management procedure for energy saving TDM-PONs

Abstract In order to minimize energy consumption in Time Division Multiplexing-Passive Optical Network (TDM-PON), IEEE and ITU-T have mandated sleep mode mechanism for Optical Network Units (ONUs) in the latest TDM-PON standards (e.g. IEEE P1904.1 SIEPON, ITU-T G.sup45). The sleep mode mechanism is a promising mean for maximizing energy saving in an ONU. An ONU in sleep mode flips between sleep and active state depending on the presence or absent of upstream and downstream frames. To ensure Quality of Service (QoS) of upstream frames, the recent TDM-PON standards introduced an early wake-up mechanism, in which an ONU is forced to leave the sleep state on upstream frame arrival. When the Optical Line Terminal (OLT) of a TDM-PON allows early wake-up of its connected ONUs, it allocates gratuitous grants for the sleeping ONUs along with allocating upstream grants for the ONUs in active state. Note that, the gratuitous grants control message sent periodically by the OLT on Inter-Gratuitous grant Interval (IGI) time. After leaving sleep state due to the arrival of upstream frame, the ONU uses its allocated gratuitous grant to send a control message mentioning the amount of upstream bandwidth (upstream grant) required in order to forward the remaining frames in its buffer. However, the existing early wake-up process of ONU can lead to increase the energy consumption of an ONU. It is because of the ONU wakes-up immediately from the sleep state on arrival of the upstream frame, but even so, it needs to wait for forwarding the frame until its allocated gratuitous grant period, resulting in spending energy unnecessarily. In addition, current energy saving solution for TDM-PONs do not provide a clear solution on how to manage different types of grants (e.g. listening grant, upstream transmission grant) within a Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation (DBA) polling cycle. To address this problem, we propose a state-of-art Grant Management Procedure (GMP) in order to maximize energy saving in a TDM-PON with sleep mode enabled ONUs. GMP contributes in defining the location of the different types of grants during a DBA polling cycle. Furthermore, GMP devises a mechanism so as to allow an ONU to predict its assigned gratuitous grant control message arrival time, thereby allowing an ONU to remain its transceiver unit powered off until the arrival period of the next gratuitous grant control message, increasing the energy saving of the ONU. Results show that, with the increment of IGI, the energy saving performance of an ONU with GMP increases noticeably in compare to a conventional ONU (an ONU that does not use GMP) without imposing any additional upstream frame delay.