Fog Integration with Optical Access Networks from an Energy Efficiency Perspective

Access networks are continuously going through many reformations to make them better suited for various demanding applications and meet new challenging requirements. On one hand, incorporating fog and edge computing has become a necessity for alleviating network congestions and supporting numerous applications that can no longer rely on the resources of a remote cloud. On the other hand, energy-efficiency has grown to be essential for these networks to reduce both their operational costs and carbon footprint but often leads to degradation in their network performance. In this paper, we study the challenges posed by these two imperatives by examining the integration of fog computing with passive optical networks (PONs) under power-conserving frameworks. As most power-conserving frameworks in the literature are centralized-based, we also propose a decentralized-based framework and compare its performance with its centralized counterpart. We study the possible cloudlet placements and the offloading performance in each allocation paradigm to determine which paradigm is able to meet the requirements of next-generation access networks by having better network performance with less energy consumption.