A Green Converged TWDM-PON and 5G HetNet Catering Applications Demanding Low Latency

Abstract Integration of Passive Optical Network (PON) and wireless network technologies can offer a high data rate with ubiquitous Internet access to the end-users. Due to the growing importance of reducing the carbon footprint of telecommunication networks, energy-saving mechanisms are dispensed in the networking equipment. One of the commonly used approaches to reduce energy consumption is the “sleep mode” in which a network equipment periodically turns off some of its components so as to reduce energy consumption. Note that, the current PON and wireless access network technologies have their own power-saving modes. In order to gain power-saving and meet latency of applications in an integrated PON and wireless access network technologies, both optical and wireless access technologies need to have consent on how traffic management (bandwidth allocation, traffic forwarding path), as well as power-saving modes, should be managed in the network. That is, there needs to have synchronization of these two network segments. Otherwise, the end-users would experience longer delay and lower throughput. In this paper, we introduce a Delay-Aware Integrated Sleep Mode (DISM) solution designed considering 5G Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) architecture which connected with core networks through Time and Wavelength Division Multiplexed Passive Optical Network (TWDM-PON). In particular, we propose a power saving mechanism using sleep mode for TWDM-PON taking into account packet forwarding delay from the optical network termination point to the end-users’ mobile terminal so as to maximize energy-saving in TWDM-PON while meeting latency requirements of applications with stringent latency requirements. Results obtained through simulations impart that our proposed scheme can significantly satisfy the delay requirement of the traffic while it can still reduce energy consumption in TWDM-PON. Furthermore, the results provide insights on how power saving mechanism in PON should be managed for such 5G HetNet and optical integrated networks in order to satisfy the latency requirement of the traffic.