Power-aware Algorithms for Energy-efficient Elastic Optical Backbone and Metro Networks

Research in Optical Networking has recently focused on Elastic Optical Network architectures, that support elastic band connections to increase spectrum availability, support high transmission rates and reduce network costs. Elastic optical networks offer flexibility in the way capacity is assigned to connections and are considered the most prevalent solution for the next generation metro/backbone networks. Reduction in energy consumption is an important issue in such networks. In this work, a new power aware algorithm is introduced, which selectively switches off network links under low utilization scenarios supporting energy efficiency. A new power-aware scheme is proposed, which reduces the total energy consumption, while maintaining a low blocking probability under dynamic traffic. Extensive simulation results are presented, which indicate that the proposed heuristic algorithm achieves a power saving of up to 9%, compared to a simple energy unaware dynamic RSA algorithm.