Energy-aware service plane co-scheduling of a novel integrated optical network-IT infrastructure

Energy efficiency is becoming an increasingly important factor to consider in day-to-day operations, and the Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) arena is no exception. The energy consumption in the ICT sector is increasing at a rate that deems energy consumption a possible limitation to the continuous fast growth of the future Internet. We address this limitation in two ways. (1) We propose a service oriented energy efficient Internet architecture. This architecture exploits the advantages of the unified provisioning of optical network and IT resources provided by the service plane architecture. It introduces an energy-aware analytical model and algorithms that cooperatively optimise the selection and scheduling of resources such that the overall power consumption by both the network and IT resources is minimised. (2) We propose a new infrastructure scenario which introduces integrated “OXC-IT” resource nodes in addition to the separate IT resource sites at the network edge. This scenario is evaluated against the typical scenario of network nodes and IT resource sites in separate location. Our results show that through the service plane, energy-aware algorithms provide significant energy savings of 13 % and the proposed infrastructure model can provide savings of 57%.