Abstract-The growing energy footprint of communication networks has raised concern about the sustainability of future network development. The GreenTouch consortium was founded to help counter this trend by developing and integrating green network technologies from the access to the core. In order to evaluate these technologies, an end-to-end network power model was developed in the form of the Green Meter, a tool to assess the overall impact and overall energy efficiency benefits from an entire portfolio of solutions. In this paper, we describe the methodology of the Green Meter for the residential fixed access portion, which was extended to include metro aggregation. A baseline architecture for optical access and metro aggregation networks is defined, and adapted to other scenarios integrating future technologies. The performance is each time evaluated through a mathematical model that captures the energy savings at the component level and has the ability to compute the overall system-level energy savings. We show that energy efficiency can be improved 29-fold over a decade (2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015)(2016)(2017)(2018)(2019)(2020) with business-asusual trends, and with the added effort of introducing GreenTouch solutions, this could be further improved to achieve a 257-fold increase in energy efficiency. The results confirm that an emphasis on green network design can indeed have a huge impact on reducing the energy consumption of optical access infrastructure.

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We consider a virtualized RAN architecture for 5G networks where the Remote Units are connected to a central unit via a mid-haul. To support high data rates, the midhaul is realized with a Passive Optical Network (PON). In this architecture, the data are stored at the central unit until the scheduler decides to transmit it through the mid-haul to an appropriate remote unit, and then over the air at the same slot. We study an optimal scheduling problem that arises in this context. This problem has two key features. First, multiple cells must be scheduled simultaneously for efficient operation. Second, the interplay between the time-varying wireless interface rates and the fixed capacity PON needs to be handled efficiently. In this paper, we take a comprehensive look at this resource allocation problem by formulating it as a utility-maximization problem. Using combinatorial techniques, we derive useful structural properties of the optimal allocation and utilize these results to design polynomial-time approximation algorithms and a pseudopolynomial-time optimal algorithm. Finally, we numerically compare the performance of the proposed algorithms to heuristics which are natural generalizations of the ubiquitous Proportional Fair algorithm.

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