This paper proposes a power saving mechanism with variable sleep period to reduce the power consumed by optical network units (ONUs) in passive optical network (PON) systems. In the PON systems based on time division multiplexing (TDM), sleep and periodic wake-up (SPW) control is an effective ONU power saving technique. However, the effectiveness of SPW control is fully realized only if the sleep period changes in accordance with the traffic conditions. This paper proposes an SPW control mechanism with variable sleep period. The proposed mechanism sets the sleep period according to traffic conditions, which greatly improves the power saving effect. In addition, the protocols needed between an optical line terminal (OLT) and ONUs are described on the assumption that the proposed mechanism is applied to 10 Gigabit (10G) class PON systems, i.e. IEEE 802.3av 10G-EPON and FSAN/ITU-T 10G-PON systems. The validity of the proposed mechanism is confirmed by numerical simulations.