Protocol Design for Energy Efficient OLT in TWDM-EPON Supporting Diverse Delay Bounds

Abstract

Owing to the Economic and Environmental concerns, energy-efficient Time and Wavelength Division Multiplexed Ethernet Passive Optical Network (TWDM-EPON) has already emerged as an important research area. TWDM-EPON allows saving energy at the Optical Line Terminal (OLT) along with Optical Network Units (ONUs), where existing protocols to save energy at ONUs of TDM-EPON can be employed. Moreover, a TWDM-EPON network is bound to support traffic with diverse delay bound to fulfil the recent need for supporting a variety of applications. Therefore, in this paper, for the first time to the best of our knowledge, we propose an online scheduling protocol to achieve energy efficiency at the OLT of a TWDM-EPON network that can support traffic with diverse delay bounds. Simulation results depict that the protocol provides a significant reduction in the probability of delay bound violation while maintaining a similar energy efficiency figure when compared with the most energy-efficient existing online protocol for a single traffic type. The performance of the protocol improves when the network is scaled up or the dimension of the network increases, and hence, suitable for both rural and urban scenarios.