Towards an effective energy efficient passive optical network

Communication networks' energy consumption poses a considerable threat to the environment stability. The expansion of access networks, which constitute the main playground of the Internet backhaul, is accompanied by numerous energy inefficient devices and equipments. Passive optical networks (PONs) is a potential dominant technology on the field of access networking, hence the reduction of the consumed energy of the optical devices forms a critical issue. In this paper, an efficient green PON is introduced, having two main targets: a) to reduce the energy consumption, by allowing optical devices to operate longer in sleep mode, and b) to maintain PON's good performance. Beyond the green provisioning, the proposed scheme is able to increase occasionally the network performance in terms of mean packet delay and packet drop ratio. This is accomplished by reducing the amount of control messages between subscribers, operating in sleep mode, and central office, allowing more bandwidth to be allocated for data delivering.