Greening the Optical Backbone Networks: a Traffic Engineering Approach

Abstract—Since telecom networks consume a large (and increasing) amount of energy, green-supported strategies are desirable to help Service Providers (SP) operate their networks and provision services more energy-efficiently. In this study, we focus on designing and operating optical backbone networks with green strategies. First, a number of approaches from component layer to network layer are discussed, which should help improve the power efficiency of the Internet. Then, we consider a typical layered optical backbone architecture, and minimize the Operational Power for connection provisioning following a Traffic Engineering (TE) approach. Connection provisioning is schematically decomposed as multiple serial operations, and power efficiency is analyzed for both optical bypass and traffic grooming. We propose a novel auxiliary graph, which can capture the flow of operations and their associated power. Based on the auxiliary graph, we present a Power-Aware scheme that minimizes the Operational Power at operation level. Simulation results show reduced power consumption by our scheme, in comparison to a generic traffic grooming approach.