A Study of Energy-Aware Traffic Grooming in Optical Networks: Static and Dynamic Cases

Less attention has been given to energy aware optical counterparts, compared to the research in energy-aware wireless and ethernet networks. In this paper, we consider energy-aware traffic grooming problems in optical networks for both static and dynamic cases. Rather than simply considering a logical architecture of an optical node, we specifically look further into the modular physical architecture. We show that by reusing already active physical components during request allocations, we can significantly reduce the total number of active components and, hence, total energy consumption in the network, especially when traffic load is low. Since energy usage is an important element of operational expenditure, this approach provides the financial motivation for service providers along with the desired environmental motivation. We present a mathematical formulation of the problems, propose auxiliary graph based heuristics, and justify our cases compared to traditional approaches, based on simulation results.