Energy-efficient optical network units for OFDM PON based on time-domain interleaved OFDM technique

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a new scheme to reduce the energy consumption of optical network units (ONUs) in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing passive optical networks (OFDM PONs) by using time-domain interleaved OFDM (TI-OFDM) technique. In a conventional OFDM PON, each ONU has to process the complete downstream broadcast OFDM signal with a high sampling rate and a large FFT size to retrieve its required data, even if it employs a portion of OFDM subcarriers. However, in our scheme, the ONU only needs to sample and process one data group from the downlink TI-OFDM signal, effectively reducing the sampling rate and the FFT size of the ONU. Thus, the energy efficiency of ONUs in OFDM PONs can be greatly improved. A proof-of-concept experiment is conducted to verify the feasibility of the proposed scheme. Compared to the conventional OFDM PON, our proposal can save 17.1% and 26.7% energy consumption of ONUs by halving and quartering the sampling rate and the FFT size of ONUs with the use of the TI-OFDM technology.