Power saving in passive optical networks with distributed bandwidth allocation

The digital requirements of the population, due to technological advances and the evolution of the Internet, implies a massive deployment of new infrastructures and technologies. In that way, many research groups are working hard to design modern devices and new types of networks. This significant effort will allow offering access to new services, which will cover the needs of the users. Nowadays, Passive Optical Networks (PON) are constantly improving, since many groups are working simultaneously to develop technologies in this field, hence yielding benefits such as an improved quality of service and user experience, a growth of bandwidth, and energy savings. The reduction of energy consumption of an Ethernet PON (EPON) is considered the main objective of this project. The base scenario has been deployed on the OPNET simulator and the model follows the IEEE 802.3ah standard. To achieve the hereby presented results, a variation of a previous work of distributed dynamic bandwidth allocation was developed. The presence of a power saving algorithm as part of Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation allows for the collection of new data to evaluate the performance of the network. The differences between the original EPON scenario using a Distributed Dynamic Scheduling and the proposed solution lies in several factors, such as the delay of each packet, link throughput, power consumption on each DBA cycle, and total energy consumption of the system. The main goal of this project was the improvement of the system regarding energy reduction, and the results achieved with our algorithm are in the range of 7% - 9 %. Consequently, the results suggest the algorithm could be used as a real solution, taking into account the new evolution and the trends that PONs are following. Another important consideration was to achieve the best yield possible of the model guaranteeing the quality of services under normal running conditions. Some technical conditions like the maximum delay accepted on the first mile and the keep-alive properties used to maintain the connection between nodes, among others, are considered during the validation of the results