Towards Energy-Efficient Hybrid Fiber-Wireless Access Networks

In this paper, we present an energy efficient signaling framework which runs over the converged architecture of the conventional EPON and candidate 4G wireless access technologies. In the proposed framework, joint ONU-BS nodes form energy-saving pairs to enable one of the ONU modules in the pair to be in the sleep mode while the other ONU is handling the traffic forwarded by the BS module of the sleeping peer. By simulations, we show that significant energy saving is possible by putting a certain amount of the ONU-BS nodes in the sleep mode. Moreover, we show that our energy saving framework does not lead to a significant delay penalty.