Energy saving (ES) in telecommunication networks is an important criterion when planning access networks. In fiber–wireless (FiWi) access networks the ES potential is high, when compared with other architectures, because different routes and optical access points can be used by routers at the wireless section. Although some proposals to increase energy efficiency in these architectures have been presented, these are not approaches that can adapt to variations in traffic load or distribution of traffic across the network. Here we fill this gap and propose a load adaptive and fault tolerant framework for ES in FiWi access networks. This framework allows optical network units (ONUs) to enter long-standing sleep mode under low traffic conditions, reducing energy waste, permitting fast reaction to ONU or fiber failures, and allowing quality of service (QoS) to be kept at a certain level. Results show that significant ES can be achieved under low to medium traffic loads while maintaining QoS and fault tolerance.

Extending the lifespan of a wireless sensor network is a complex problem that involves several factors, ranging from device hardware capacity (batteries, processing capabilities, and radio efficiency) to the chosen software stack, which is often unaccounted for by the previous approaches. This letter proposes a genetic algorithm-based clustering optimization method for constrained networks that significantly improves the previous state-of-the-art results, while accounting for the specificities of the Internet engineering task force, Constrained RESTful Environment (CoRE), standards for data transmission and specifically relying on CoRE interfaces, which fit this purpose very well.

This paper introduces the RoFnet-Reconfigurable Radio over Fiber network, which is a project supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. This project proposes an innovative radio over fiber optical access network architecture, which combines a low cost Base Station (BS) design, incorporating reflective semiconductor optical amplifiers, with fiber dispersion mitigation provided by optical single sideband modulation techniques. Optical wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) techniques are used to simplify the access network architecture allowing for different Base Stations to be fed by a common fiber. Different wavelength channels can be allocated to different BSs depending on user requirements. Additionally, in order to improve radio coverage within a cell, it is considered a sectorized antenna interface. The combination of subcarrier multiplexing (SCM) with WDM, further simplifies the network architecture, by using a specific wavelength channel to feed an individual BS and different subcarriers to drive the individual antenna sectors within the BS.

Wireless sensor devices are usually powered with limited non-rechargeable batteries. This energy can easily be depleted when no wise consumption procedures are used, leaving the sensor non-functional. As most of the energy is consumed during the transmission of data, developing efficient data manipulation and transmission approaches is crucial and still an open problem that attracts the attention of many research groups. In this article a directed acyclic graph (DAG) based dissemination approach, where clustering and network coding techniques are applied, is proposed. As a main goal, this work aims at improving the network reliability (ensure recovery of lost packets), while minimizing energy consumption and balancing load at gateways. The proposed approach is compared to state-of-art approaches in terms of network reliability and energy saving trade-off. Experimental results demonstrate the strong performance of the proposed work.

As constrained “things” become increasingly integrated with the Internet and accessible for interactive communication, energy efficient ways to collect, aggregate, and share data over such constrained networks are needed. In this paper, we propose the use of constrained RESTful environments interfaces to build resource collections having a network lifetime increase in mind. More specifically, based on existing atomic resources, collections are created/designed to become available as new resources, which can be observed. Such resource design should not only match client's interests, but also increase network lifetime as much as possible. For this to happen, energy consumption should be balanced/fair among nodes so that node depletion is delayed. When compared with previous approaches, results show that energy efficiency and network lifetime can be increased while reducing control/registration messages, which are used to set up or change observations.