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The optical access networks (OANs) provide an attractive solution to the bandwidth bottleneck problem of the last mile. However, it has been proved (Baliga et al. in J Lightwave Technol 27(13):2391–2403, 2009; Baliga et al. in IEEE Commun Mag 49(6):70–77, 2011) that the OAN consumes a significant ratio of the total energy consumed in an optical networking scenario. This has provided incentive for inspection of energy-efficient schemes for OANs. It has been demonstrated in the literature that energy consumption figures of an OAN can be improved by either designing efficient hardware or employing better media access control (MAC) protocols. In this paper, we design a MAC protocol for OANs to ensure energy-efficiency in the presence of quality of service (QoS)-aware traffic. The proposed scheme incorporates traffic prediction-based selection of different sleep (energy-efficient) modes of operation, of …