Energy-Efficient Decentralized Framework for the Integration of Fog With Optical Access Networks

The increasing numbers of broadband users and the corresponding rapid expansion of access networks have been putting more pressure on improving their energy efficiency to reduce both their operating costs and carbon footprint. At the center are passive optical networks (PONs), with them being one of the leading broadband technologies of today. Although they are considered to be the most energy-efficient among wired access technologies, their power consumption is still considerably high and is expected to increase over the next few years. As a result, many energy conservation frameworks have been proposed for PONs that are all centralized-based. In this paper, we propose a novel PON energy-conservation framework that is, for the first time, decentralized-based. Not only does the proposed framework aim to provide better network performance while conserving energy, but it also supports novel cloudlet placements for integrating fog computing with PONs by utilizing edge-to-edge communications. The framework is therefore designed to meet the requirements of next-generation access networks by addressing three main challenges; conserving energy, achieving high network performance, and supporting fog computing.