Making FTTH Greener - Reducing FTTH Power Consumption by 10 Fold

The purpose of this paper is to discuss different approaches to the improvement of energy efficiency in optical access networks. We will consider standard compliant solutions for the short term and disruptive solutions with higher efficiency gains on the long term. In addition to recent concerns about the carbon footprint of the telecommunication infrastructure, power consumption in access systems has historically represented a problem for network operators due to the cost of power supply in remote units, heat dissipation in high density access nodes of the central offices and requirements for backup battery capacity for lifeline service support during periods of power outage. The current engineering approaches to minimizing the power consumption, such as ASIC integration, migration to smaller scale CMOS technologies, efficient cooling, dynamic power management and sleep modes, will not be sufficient to keep the power consumption at the current level considering the exponential growth of traffic in the future. The need for dramatic improvement in energy efficiency will mandate disruptive changes in the implementation of access networks. In the present paper, we describe power saving methods for passive optical networks (PON). Though PON is already among the most energy efficient wireline access solutions, significant improvements can be achieved for current and next generation systems.