An Internet of Things Traffic-Based Power Saving Scheme in Cloud-Radio Access Network

With the proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the load caused by network demands has been increasing. This has direct consequences in terms of increased network requests and thus significantly higher energy consumption. To this end, this paper focuses on network power saving. In a cloud-radio access network with fiber-wireless, we propose a power saving method based on the optical line terminals (OLTs) and optical network units (ONUs), the equipment responsible for data transmission to and from the devices. Our proposed method is based on the novel idea of dividing the sleep phase of the ONUs into time slots, which facilitates synchronization and coordination in the whole system, thus increasing resource efficiency and bringing power economy not only to the ONUs, but also to the OLTs and the network as a whole. This is in contrast to the existing literature, which considers only ONUs or OLTs separately, without focusing on the cooperation within the system. Additionally, our proposed method was created with IoT traffic in mind. and it was designed to guarantee a maximum delay in order to make it applicable to mobile and real-time IoT. Finally, our proposed method allows the network to operate without external power sources for the ONUs by using power over fiber in conjunction with the OLT. Mathematical analyses show that our proposed method can successfully decrease the system’s energy consumption.