Impact of FTTN architecture on access node energy efficiency

Although a strong growth in fiber based access technology is projected, still over half of of the fixed broadband users will use a form of copper based access technology such as digital subscriber line (DSL) in the coming years. This growth is further asserted by the latest breakthrough boosting the capacity of copper access such as Vectoring and Phantom mode. While most of the state of the art power efficiency improvement strategies for communication systems focuses on the optimization of one specific building block at a time, we take another approach based on the deployment practices and how different access network architectures can improve the energy consumption. To achieve substantial energy savings, we look at the complete broadband access network and its supporting functions. Not only the access network equipment such as the DSL Access Multiplexer (DSLAM) is considered but also the supporting functions which are required to make sure that the equipment can operate. It will be shown in this paper that up to 50% of the energy consumption in the distributed deployment can be saved compared to the centralized architecture.