Energy-Efficient Frame Aggregation Scheme in IoT Over Fiber-Wireless Networks

With the tremendous growth of traffic demand caused by the conventional service and emerging Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications, it is vitally challenging to support seamlessly access for billions of IoT devices along with existing Internet service. Fiber-Wireless (FiWi) access networks is an ideal solution for the next-generation access networks to support both IoT and conventional service. One of the main challenges faced by the design of an FiWi access network is the high energy consumption due to low utilization of optical network units (ONUs) and high control overhead of data transmission. In this article, An adaptive frame aggregation scheme with load transfer is proposed to reduce the energy consumption in FiWi. By evaluating the quality of wireless channel, the proposed scheme adaptively adjusts the length of the aggregated frame to reduce the energy consumption caused by the frequent preemption of wireless channel and the numerous retransmission of data frames resulted by poor channel quality. In the optical backhaul, according to the delay requirements of services with different priorities, the proposed scheme calculates the optimal frame length for each queue and performs load transfer among ONUs to dynamically distribute network load and maximize the sleep rate of ONUs for energy saving. Simulation results and theoretical analysis both unanimously show that the proposed scheme achieves significant amounts of energy saving, while preserving delay performance of various services.