In this work, we investigate the utilization of transmission power control as
mechanism to increase the energy efficiency in optical code division multiplexing
access (OCDMA) networks. We have modeled the energy efficiency considering the
optical fiber transmission and network infrastructure as encoders, decoders and star
coupler. In the analyzed scenario, this model confirms that the energy consumption of
the network infrastructure is larger than the energy consumption of the transmission
infrastructure; On the other hand, we have proposed a scheme to define the energy
efficiency according to the BER level accomplished with the quality of service (QoS)
requirements. The main results showed that it is possible to save 70% of the
transmitted energy per bit with the penalty of one order of magnitude of BER.
