Fog Computing in Optical Access Networks: An Energy-efficient and Deadline-aware Task Scheduling Mechanism

Fog computing is paving the way for catering latency stringent applications (e.g., augmented reality and virtual reality) at the customer premises. Fog computing nodes are located between the end user devices and remote cloud. They are lightweight and small-scale storage and processing system deployed closer to the data source, allowing faster processing as well as providing privacy and security of the data. We have been witnessing a growing number of solutions that integrate Passive Optical Network (PON) with the fog computing. Along this research line, there are some solutions considering fog computing nodes are co-located with the Optical Line Terminal (OLT), the central intelligence of a PON system, and Optical Network Unit (ONU), a customer premises equipment. There are some solutions, on the other hand, that propose to embed computing and storage functionality within PON equipment itself. In this paper, we particularly focus on the later approach. Here, we propose an energy conserving solution for a PON system with fog computing enabled ONUs, i.e., the ONUs are equipped with additional Computing and Storage Units (CSUs). Our solution aims at minimizing energy consumption of a PON system by keeping only the required number of CSUs active and allowing the ONUs to move into sleep mode (whenever possible) by taking into account task arrival rate and task completion deadline.