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
