Reducing power consumption in optical access networks

The growing demand for broadband services has led to thewidespread deployment of optical access networks (OANs).However, as these networks expand, energy consumption isbecoming an increasingly important economic and environ-mental issue. In this paper, we analyze the energy savings ofthe transition from a point-to-point (P2P) optical architecture toa gigabit-capable passive optical network (GPON) with a point-to-multipoint (P2MP) architecture. We present a comparativeanalysis of the energy requirements of both architectures, focus-ing on active and passive components, and evaluate theirimpact on overall energy consumption. Using a case study ofthe migration of a real optical network operator’s network, weshow that power consumption decreased significantly after theintroduction of GPON.