Adaptive ONU Energy-Saving via Software-Defined Mechanisms in TDMA-PON

Passive optical network (PON) is a prominent technology in the access network technologies that provides the essential high transmission capacity, “future-proof” medium that has penetrated 30-70% of households top countries and thus consumes a significant amount of energy. To satisfy rapidly evolving and newly emerging services, PON devices have to be evolved in order to make them adaptable to the always changing requirements while facilitating energy-saving operations. In this paper, we propose an adaptive software-defined (SD) ONU energy-saving mechanism. We propose to enhance the standard PON devices with advanced SDN capabilities so that an SD-controller can practice its global network knowledge to orchestrate an independent energy-saving mechanism for ONU's receiver (Rx) and transmitter (Tx) via the assignment of Rx sleeping duration and Tx wake-up threshold, respectively. In low traffic condition, the proposed mechanism can reduce the ONU's transmitter active time up to 98% while still guaranteeing the QoS requirements. We provide system performance evaluation in terms of average delay, throughput, and energy-saving improvement.