Extending ONU lifetime beyond 72 hours in EPON for emergency communications

The first 72 hours of any disaster relief are critical for saving lives, and are thus referred to as the “golden 72 hours”. In order to extend the optical network unit (ONU) lifetime beyond 72 hours in Ethernet passive optical network (EPON) for emergency communications, this paper proposes proper MAC control, traffic scheduling, and admission control schemes to achieve extremely low energy consumptions of ONUs. Simulation results show that the proposed schemes can efficiently reduce the energy consumptions of ONUs by over 90%. Therefore, the lifetime of an ONU whose battery originally has 8-hour backup time is potentially able to be extended beyond 72 hours.