A SIEPON based transmitter sleep mode energy-efficient mechanism in EPON

Abstract The main energy consumption in computer networks is the access networks. The passive optical network (PON) has the least energy consumption among access network technologies. In addition, the time division multiplexing (TDM) Ethernet PON (EPON) is one of the best candidates to improve energy consumption by time utilization. The optical network unit (ONU) can utilize the time and save the energy in the EPON by turning off its transmitter/receiver when there is no upstream/downstream traffic. The ITU-T and IEEE organizations are published standards for energy-saving in the TDM-PON. Although their standards provide the framework to accomplish the energy-saving, the algorithms/criteria to generate events to accommodate various operational policies, time to wake up, parameter values for timers are out of scope of the standards. Many studies have proposed schemes for energy-saving in TDM-PON to achieve maximum energy saving. Even so, these schemes increase the mean packet delay and consequently, reduce the quality of service (QoS). In this paper, first we take a look to the state of the art for PON energy-saving. Additionally, a mechanism based on SIEPON standard in EPON with new components in the ONUs and optical line terminal (OLT) is proposed to save the transmitter energy and guarantee QoS. The proposed mechanism follows the SIEPON standard, considers the QoS first, and then saves the energy as far as possible. The ONU sleep controller unit (OSC) and green dynamic bandwidth allocation (GDBA) are used to calculate the ONU transmitter sleep (Tx) duration and grant the proper time to the ONUs. Simulation results show that the proposed energy-saving mechanism not only promises the QoS performance in terms of mean packet delay, packet loss, throughput, and jitter, but also saves energy in different maximum cycle times.