Energy Efficient Point-to-Point PON-based Architecture for the Backhaul of a VLC System

Abstract

This paper proposes a point-to-point passive optical network (P2P-PON) architecture as an energy-efficient and low-latency backhaul solution for visible light communication (VLC)-enabled indoor fog computing systems. The proposed architecture passively interconnects VLC access points and distributed in-building fog servers through dedicated optical links, enabling flexible peer-to-peer connectivity and efficient traffic aggregation. A mixed integer linear programming (MILP) framework is developed to jointly optimize processing resource allocation, traffic routing, power consumption, and end-to-end queuing delay across a multi-layer fog computing infrastructure. The model explicitly captures the power consumption of both networking and processing elements and incorporates a piecewise linear approximation of an M/M/1 queuing model to represent delay-sensitive applications. The performance of the proposed P2P-PON architecture is evaluated and compared against an arrayed waveguide grating router (AWGR)-based PON architecture under multiple indoor traffic scenarios. The results show that the proposed P2P-PON architecture reduces total power consumption by up to 64\% under power-aware optimization and by 15\% under delay-aware optimization, while reducing average end-to-end queuing delay by up to 76\% compared to the AWGR-PON architecture, due to the improved in-building connectivity and more effective utilization of distributed fog resources.