Flexibility evaluation of hybrid WDM/TDM PONs

A hybrid WDM/TDM passive optical network (PON) is a promising candidate for next-generation optical access (NGOA) solutions. Several hybrid WDM/TDM PON architectures can be designed, each with a different degree of flexibility, going from fully static, over partially flexible to fully flexible architectures. A flexible architecture can serve several advantages, like energy efficiency, network migration and network extensibility. The more flexible architectures, however, are either more expensive, experience a higher power loss or are less secure. A question that arises is if a fully flexible architecture really needed. An important assessment parameter is the number of wavelengths required at a certain network load. In this paper, we introduce and compare two different flavors of flexibility based on the multicasting and switching functionality of different architectures. By exhaustive simulation, we study the gains of different variants of flexibility with different traffic models

General QoS-Aware Scheduling Procedure for Passive Optical Networks

Increasing volume, dynamism, and diversity of access traffic have complicated the challenging problem of dynamic resource allocation in passive optical networks. We introduce a general scheduling procedure for passive optical networks, which optimizes a desired performance metric for an arbitrary set of operational constraints. The proposed scheduling has a fast and causal iterative implementation, where each iteration involves a local optimization problem followed by a recursive update of some status information. The generality of the platform enables a proper description of the diverse quality of service requirements, while its low computational complexity makes agile tracking of the network dynamism possible. To demonstrate its versatility and generality, the applications of the scheme for service-differentiated dynamic bandwidth allocation in time- and wavelength-division-multiplexed passive optical networks are discussed. To further reduce the computational complexity, a closed-form solution of the involved optimization in each iteration of the scheduling is derived. We directly incorporate transmission delay in the scheduling and show how the consumed power is traded for the tolerable amount of transmission delay. Furthermore, a 50% power efficiency improvement is reported by exploiting the inherent service diversity among subscribers. The impact of service prioritization, finite buffer length, and packet drops on the power efficiency of the scheme are also investigated

Wavelength reconfigurability for next generation optical access networks

Next generation optical access networks should not only increase the capacity but also be able to redistribute the capacity on the fly in order to manage larger variations in traffic patterns. Wavelength reconfigurability is the instrument to enable such capability of network-wide bandwidth redistribution since it allows dynamic sharing of both wavelengths and timeslots in WDM-TDM optical access networks. However, reconfigurability typically requires tunable lasers and tunable filters at the user side, resulting in cost-prohibitive optical network units (ONU). In this dissertation, I propose a novel concept named cyclic-linked flexibility to address the cost-prohibitive problem. By using the cyclic-linked flexibility, the ONU needs to switch only within a subset of two pre-planned wavelengths, however, the cyclic-linked structure of wavelengths allows free bandwidth to be shifted to any wavelength by a rearrangement process. Rearrangement algorithm are developed to demonstrate that the cyclic-linked flexibility performs close to the fully flexible network in terms of blocking probability, packet delay, and packet loss. Furthermore, the evaluation shows that the rearrangement process has a minimum impact to in-service ONUs. To realize the cyclic-linked flexibility, a family of four physical architectures is proposed. PRO-Access architecture is suitable for new deployments and disruptive upgrades in which the network reach is not longer than 20 km. WCL-Access architecture is suitable for metro-access merger with the reach up to 100 km. PSB-Access architecture is suitable to implement directly on power-splitter-based PON deployments, which allows coexistence with current technologies. The cyclically-linked protection architecture can be used with current and future PON standards when network protection is required

Performance Analysis of TCP Traffic and Its Influence on ONU’s Energy Saving in Energy Efficient TDM-PON

The majority of the traffic over the Internet is TCP based, which is very sensitive to packet loss and delay. Existing research efforts in TDM-Passive Optical Networks (TDM-PONs) mostly evaluate energy saving and traffic delay performances under different energy saving solutions. However, to the best of our knowledge, how energy saving mechanisms could affect TCP traffic performance in TDM-PONs has hardly been studied. In this paper, by means of our state-of-art OPNET Modular based TDM-PON simulator, we evaluate TCP traffic delay, throughput, and Optical Network Unit (ONU) energy consumption performances in a TDM-PON where energy saving mechanisms are employed in ONUs. Here, we study the performances under commonly used energy saving mechanisms defined in standards for TDM-PONs: cyclic sleep and doze mode. In cyclic sleep mode, we evaluate the performances under two well-known sleep interval length deciding algorithms (i.e. fixed sleep interval (FSI) and exponential sleep interval deciding (ESID)) that an OLT uses to decide sleep interval lengths for an ONU. Findings in this paper put forward the strong relationship among TCP traffic delay, throughput and ONU energy consumption under different sleep interval lengths. Moreover, we reveal that under high TCP traffic, both FSI and ESID will end up showing similar delay, energy and throughput performance. Our findings also show that doze mode can offer better TCP throughput and delay performance at the price of consuming more energy than cyclic sleep mode. In addition, our results provide a glimpse on understanding at what point doze mode becomes futile in improving energy saving of an ONU under TCP traffic. Furthermore, in this paper, we highlight important research issues that should be studied in future research to maximize energy saving in TDM-PONs while meeting traffic Quality of Service requirements

Early Wake-Up Decision Algorithm for ONUs in TDM-PONs With Sleep Mode

Recent IEEE and ITU-T standards for TDM-Passive Optical Network (TDM-PON) with sleep mode recommend that the Optical Line Terminal (OLT) in a TDM-PON should be in charge of invoking an Optical Network Units (ONU) to move into sleep state in absence of frames. It is considered that, on upstream frame arrival, a sleeping ONU can leave sleep state, in which an ONU turns off its transmitter or both transmitter and receiver immediately, prior to its assigned sleep interval length. In this paper, we refer to this approach as immediate early wakeup (IMEW). According to the standards, the OLT may or may not allow an ONU to trigger early wake-up function (EWF) on upstream frames arrival. If the OLT does not allow EWF (not support early wake-up (NSEW)), an ONU should stay in sleep state during its assigned sleep duration and buffer all the upstream frames while it is in this state. In IMEW, upstream frames experience small delay but ONU’s energy consumption increases remarkably. Conversely, in NSEW, an ONU consumes less energy compared to IMEW at the price of increasing upstream frame delay and possibility of its buffer overflow. In this paper, the limitations of IMEW and NSEW have motivated us to propose a novel Early Wake-up Decision (EWuD) algorithm which aims at meeting upstream frame delay requirement while reducing ONUs’ energy consumption as much as possible. The role of EWuD algorithm is to select an appropriate time for triggering EWF taking into consideration two factors: (1) buffer overflow probability and (2) delay requirement violation of upstream frames. We evaluate EWuD performances using our TDM-PON OPNET Modular based simulation model under wide range of scenarios. Findings demonstrate that our proposed EWuD can successfully meet delay requirement of all upstream frames while reducing ONU’s energy consumption significantly

Resource management research in ethernet passive optical networks

The last decades, we have witnessed different phenomenology in the telecommunications sector. One of them is the widespread use of the Internet, which has brought a sharp increase in traffic, forcing suppliers to continuously expand the capacity of networks. In the near future, Internet will be composed of long-range highspeed optical networks; a number of wireless networks at the edge; and, in between, several access technologies. Today one of the main problems of the Internet is the bottleneck in the access segment. To address this issue the Passive Optical Networks (PONs) are very likely to succeed, due to their simplicity, low-cost, and increased bandwidth. A PON is made up of fiber optic cabling and passive splitters and couplers that distribute an optical signal to connectors that terminate each fiber segment. Among the different PON technologies, the Ethernet-PON (EPON) is a great alternative to satisfy operator and user needs, due to its cost, flexibility and interoperability with other technologies. One of the most interesting challenges in such technologies relates to the scheduling and allocation of resources in the upstream (shared) channel, i.e., the resource management. The aim of this thesis is to study and evaluate current contributions and propose new efficient solutions to address the resource management issues mainly in EPON. Key issues in this context are future end-user needs, quality of service (QoS) support, energy-saving and optimized service provisioning for real-time and elastic flows. This thesis also identifies research opportunities, issue recommendations and proposes novel mechanisms associated with access networks based on optical fiber technologies.Postprint (published version

An FPGA implementation of a sleep enabled PON system

Owing to the growing demand for bandwidth-hungry video-on-demand applications, Passive Optical Network (PON) has been widely considered as one of the most promising solutions for broadband access. Environmental concerns motivated network designers to lower energy consumption of optical access networks. A well-known approach to reduce energy consumption is to allow network elements to switch to the sleep mode. In this framework, an improved Optical network Unit (ONU) architecture in TDM-PON is proposed to reduce the handover time of status switching. Energy-saving performances of current and improved architectures are compared in different scenarios. The simulation results show that by applying a proper sleep mode mechanism, the improved architecture can effectively reduce the ONU energy consumption. We further implement the cycle sleep scheme on a multi-ONU testbed based on the improved ONU architecture. The experimental results have substantiated the viability of the improved ONU architecture

Design of qos-aware energy-efficient fiber–wireless access networks

Energy-efficient network design has recently become a very important topic because of the energy cost increases in service providers’ infrastructures. This is of particular importance in access networks because of the growing demand for digital traffic by end users. Here we address the challenge of reducing the energy consumption of fiber–wireless (FiWi) access networks, that use both optical and radio frequency technologies to provide high bandwidth and ubiquity for end-user applications, while keeping delay under a threshold. Our goal is to find optimal sleep mode schedulings that allow energy consumption to be reduced while keeping packet delay acceptable. For this purpose a mathematical formalization and an algorithm are developed. The results show that the proposed approach is able to reduce the average packet delay, with negligible energy cost increases, in many scenarios, besides being computationally efficient and scalable. The proposed approach may, therefore, serve as a basis for planning and design of quality of service-aware energy-efficient FiWi access networks.This work was supported by FCT (Foundation for Science and Technology) of Portugal within CEOT (Center for Electronic, Optoelectronic and Telecommunications)