Energy Efficient PON Backhaul Network for a VLC Based Fog Architecture

Abstract: In this paper, an energy efficient passive optical network (PON) architecture is proposed for backhaul connectivity in indoor visible light communication (VLC) systems. The proposed network is used to support a fog computing architecture allowing users with processing demands to access dedicated fog nodes and idle processing resources in other user devices within a building. The fog resources within a building complement fog nodes at higher layers of the access and metro networks and the central cloud data center. A mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model is developed to minimize the total power consumption associated with serving demands over the proposed architecture. The results show that the PON backhaul network improves the energy efficiency of fog computing by 66% for networking and 12% for processing compared to an architecture based on state-of-the-art Spine-and-Leaf connectivity.