A Quantitative Survey of the Power Saving Potential in IP-Over-WDM Backbone Networks

The power consumption in Information and Communication Technologies networks is growing year by year; this growth presents challenges from technical, economic, and environmental points of view. This has lead to a great number of research publications on “green” telecommunication networks. In response, a number of survey works have appeared as well. However, with respect to backbone networks, most survey works: 1) do not allow for an easy cross validation of the savings reported in the various works and 2) nor do they provide a clear overview of the individual and combined power saving potentials. Therefore, in this paper, we survey the reported saving potential in IP-over-WDM backbone telecommunication networks across the existing body of research in that area. We do this by mapping more than ten different approaches to a concise analytical model, which allows us to estimate the combined power reduction potential. Our estimates indicate that the power reduction potential of the once-only approaches is 2.3× in a Moderate Effort scenario and 31× in a Best Effort scenario. Factoring in the historic and projected yearly efficiency improvements (“Moore's law”) roughly doubles both values on a ten-year horizon. The large difference between the outcome of Moderate Effort and Best Effort scenarios is explained by the disparity and lack of clarity of the reported saving results and by our (partly) subjective assessment of the feasibility of the proposed approaches. The Moderate Effort scenario will not be sufficient to counter the projected traffic growth, although the Best Effort scenario indicates that sufficient potential is likely available. The largest isolated power reduction potential is available in improving the power associated with cooling and power provisioning and applying sleep modes to overdimensioned equipment.