An improvement of cycle-based energy-saving scheme in medium-load traffic for NG-EPON networks

Next generation passive optical networks provide a large amount of bandwidth but also consumes a lot of power. The ONUs of such networks dominate a major portion of energy consumption. A previous cycle-based energy saving scheme can only apply to those heavy-load ONUs with a bandwidth request size more than 2 times maximum transmission window. Therefore, to enhance the scalability of such an energy saving scheme for accommodating a wider range traffic load, this paper proposes a new process that relaxes the threshold of request size for allowing more ONUs entering inter-cycle sleep mode. It can then schedules ONUs to a designated time slot on next cycle to increase energy saving effect. The simulation results show that the proposed process can actually improve power consumption of targeted ONUs with medium-load traffic effectively.