Design and Analysis of a Novel Energy Efficient Ethernet Passive Optical Network

Ethernet Passive Optical Network (EPON) has become an important access network for realizing FTTX. Due to its broadcast nature in EPON, each Optical Network Unit (ONU) needs to examine every downstream frame delivered from Optical Line Terminal (OLT) to determine whether the frame is destined to it or not. This results in a waste of energy for all ONUs in a PON system. To reduce power consumption, we propose a new MAC that turns a PON system to be a slotted one when the system is operating in light load state. By doing so, an ONU can turn off its transmitter, receiver, and even part of the MAC controller to reduce power consumption. We present a Markov model for the system. Numerical results reveal that an ONU can still have 20 Mbps bandwidth even if only 3% of its time is in working state.