A Loading-Aware TDMA Sleep Scheme to Improve Power Consumption Performance on Medium to High Traffic for NG-EPON Networks

The inter-cycle sleep design previously proposed as a power-saving scheme for next-generation Ethernet passive optical networks (NG-EPONs) is able to effectively decrease the power consumption of heavy-load traffic. However, with a medium to high traffic load, these networks may still suffer from a high level of power consumption if no enhanced mechanisms are used. It was noted that the optical line terminal (OLT) often fully opens all communication channels at a medium to heavy load. Moreover, the number of opened channels was changed cyclically according to the traffic loading status. Accordingly, optical network units (ONUs) may be frequently allocated to different channels with changing loads. This may lead to inefficient operation and result in significant channel tuning delays. We thus propose a loading-aware time-division multiple access (TDMA) mechanism that allows the OLT to reserve a maximum bandwidth for each ONU when the network experiences heavy-load traffic. The performance results of our simulations reveal that the proposed scheme is able to reduce power consumption for targeted medium to high loads since ONUs under such loads can extend their sleep time because the cycle length is maximized. Moreover, the total delay is maintained at a relatively low level after applying the proposed scheme since the tuning delay is reduced significantly; however, the transmission delay is slightly increased due to the increased cycle length.