Energy efficient frame structure for gigabit passive optical networks

Increasing power consumption in information and communication access networks is one of the major cause of greenhouse gas emissions. These emissions are harmful for life on earth. Passive Optical Networks (PONs) are comparatively energy efficient network but the broadcast nature of downstream traffic leads to unnecessary frames processing by the optical network units and cause of energy wastage. Bi-PON technique has solved this problem by changing the XGPON / GPON frame structure into an interleaved pattern. However, this structure also requires additional hardware changings at the optical network units. In this paper, we have tried to achieve the same objective by making a few changings in the GPON frame structure without modifying the existing hardware structure. The simulation results show that 25.25% processing energy of an ONU can be saved by incorporating these changes.