Software defined passive optical networks with energy-efficient control strategy

With the rapid growth of new broadband services and traffic flows, Passive Optical Network (PON) is facing the challenge of bandwidth crunch and energy consumption. There are a huge number of optical network elements, such as Optical Line Terminal (OLT) and Optical Network Units (ONU), which can be controlled flexibly and efficiently to improve the performance of PON. Then, software defined networking (SDN) is considered as the optimal choice for the next generation PON because of its advantages of flexible and centralized control capability. Software defined passive optical network (SPON) architecture is designed with OpenFlow protocol extension in this paper, based on which a novel energy-efficient control strategy is proposed and evaluated on SPON testbed. Also, theoretical analysis work for the energy consumption of this architecture has been conducted. Numeric results show that the proposed energy-efficient control strategy can reduce the energy consumption of optical access networks and efficiently facilitate the integration of access and metro networks resources.