QoS-aware energy-saving mechanism for hybrid optical-wireless broadband access networks

Hybrid optical-wireless broadband access network (HOWBAN) takes full advantage of the high capacity and reliability of the passive optical network and the flexibility, ubiquity of the wireless network. Similar to other access networks, the issue of high energy consumption is a great challenge for HOWBAN. In HOWBAN, optical network units (ONUs) consume a great amount of energy. The sleep of ONUs can greatly improve the energy efficiency of HOWBAN. However, the quality of service (QoS) will be decreased while the packets are waiting in ONUs and optical line terminal. In this paper, we propose a QoS-aware energy-saving mechanism. A dynamic bandwidth allocation mechanism is designed to guarantee the QoS, where different priorities are considered. Meanwhile, we employ different sleep strategies by taking different priorities’ tolerant delays into account to prolong the sleep time of ONUs. Then, based on the evaluation of packet delay, the optimal sleep parameter is derived to maximum the energy efficiency. In addition, a load balancing and resource allocation mechanism is adopted in the wireless domain to reduce the delay and congestion caused by ONUs’ sleep. Results show that the proposed mechanism can effectively improve the energy efficiency and meet the QoS requirements of packets.