Energy-efficient optical line terminal for WDM-OFDM-PON based on two-dimensional subcarrier and layer allocation

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a scheme to reduce the energy consumption of optical line terminal (OLT) in wavelength division multiplexing - orthogonal frequency division multiplexing - passive optical networks (WDM-OFDM-PONs). In our scheme, a wireless communication technique, termed layered modulation, is introduced to maximize the transmission capacity of OFDM modulation module in the OLT by multiplexing data from different ONU groups with signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) margins onto the same subcarriers. With adaptive and dynamic subcarrier and layer allocation, several ONU groups with low traffic demands can share one OFDM modulation module to deliver their data during non-peak hours of a day, thus greatly reducing the number of running devices and minimizing the energy consumption of the OLT. Numerical calculation shows that an energy efficiency improvement of 28.3% in the OLT can be achieved by using proposed scheme compared to the conventional WDM-OFDM-PON.