Power Saving Control Method with Adaptive FEC Decoder in Optical Access Network

Abstract

With the increasing demand for network services, the power consumption of equipment has been steadily rising each year, especially in the access network domain. Passive Optical Networks (PON) traditionally operate on the principle of ensuring service provision to the farthest user. Consequently, performance tends to be excessive for short to medium distances, leading to surplus power consumption. In this study, we address the issue of reducing power consumption in access networks by tackling surplus power. Our approach involves utilizing three different types of Reed-Solomon (RS) decoders to apply appropriate forward error correction (FEC) redundancy based on transmission distance, aiming to lower power consumption of RS decoders in optical network units (ONUs). Subsequently, we evaluated the power saving of FEC decoding in a 10G-class PON and report over 48% average power saving compared to the conventional homogeneous FEC-based network.