Green In-Building Networks: The Future Convergence of Green, Optical and Wireless Technologies

The global network energy consumption is increasing at an alarming rate due to proliferation of the Internet and its increasing bandwidth-intensive applications. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient Access/In-Building architecture that features energy efficient customer premises equipment (CPE) design in conjunction with an energy efficient access network protocol, and in-building optical/wireless integration using Radio-over-Fiber. We analyze the energy consumption of the proposed architecture and show that the use of these technologies could lead to up to 50% energy savings compared to the architectures that employ legacy technologies.