Energy aware routing algorithm for FiWi networks (EARF)

Access networks consume significant portion of the overall energy consumed by internet. The power consumption growth rate of internet is higher then any other consumer of energy. With the introduction of more and more bandwidth hungry applications, there is a huge pressure to reduce network energy consumption while still growing network capacity and functionality. We propose an energy aware routing algorithm for Fiber-Wireless (Fi-Wi) Networks (EARF)which not only reduce the energy consumption of the FiWi networks and but also does not degradethe overall delay of the network. We introduce dynamic thresholds for switching nodes into sleep and active mode. Our analysis shows a significant reduction in the energy consumption of the Fi-Wi networks while keeping the performance of the network up to an acceptable limit.