On forecasting the ONU sleep period in XG-PON systems using exponential smoothing techniques

Power management has been advanced on a crucial factor in the design of modern access networks. Furthermore, the proliferation of optical networking in the last mile led major Telecom unions, such as the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), to emerge energy consumption as a critical objective of the next generation passive optical networks (NG-PONs). In particular, the standardization of the 10-gigabit-capable PON (XG-PON) entails well-defined specifications towards power management and energy reduction, especially regarding the power control of optical terminal devices such as the optical network units (ONUs). In this way, the optical line terminator (OLT) along with ONUs are able to cooperate with each other in order to succeed energy reduction, by applying doze or cyclic sleep periods to idle ONUs. However, the sleep period determination remains a quite challenging research area. In this study, we endeavor to provide XG-PON networks with an effective forecasting mechanism that is capable of estimating the time duration of the forthcoming sleep session. To this end, we apply the exponential smoothing technique to best estimate the sleep duration based on the monitoring time series observations. The obtained evaluation results sound quite promising, since the proposed model accomplishes to advance the trade-off between the energy reduction and network efficiency.