Efficiency in the ICT Sector, ICTs account for 8-10%
of the European electricity consumption and up to 4%
of its carbon emissions. Furthermore, the network in-
frastructure is becoming a large portion of the energy
footprint in ICT. In (Pickavet et al., 2008) M. Pick-
avet et al., mention that for network equipment, the
energy consumption growth rates are typically about
12% per year. Thus, the concept of energy efficient
or green networking has been emerged as a research
topic.
A multitude of published papers have considered
energy efficiency in the design of IP Over WDM op-
tical networks (Shen and Tucker, 2009), (Chabarek
et al., 2008), (Melidis et al., 2019). An important ap-
proach towards energy saving in IP over optical net-
works is the selective switching off of inactive net-
work components when the traffic load is low, i.e.
during night hours (off-peak hours), while maintain-
ing the vital functions of the network, accommodating
the residual capacity. In (Chiaraviglio et al., 2009b),
energy efficient solutions ranging from Mixed Inte-
ger Linear Programming (MILP) to heuristics are pro-
posed. More precisely, these schemes disable differ-
ent network elements when the load is reduced, while
ensuring a set of important constraints such as full
connectivity and maximum utilization of a link. The
same authors in (Chiaraviglio et al., 2009a) evaluate
the actual power consumption savings considering a
real IP backbone network and a real traffic profile.
Besides the selective disconnection and low power
mode of networks elements, a considerable part of
studies are focused on virtual topology reconfigura-
tion algorithms. The authors in (Genc¸ata and Mukher-
jee, 2003) and (Yayimli and Cavdar, 2012) propose a
method of configuring the virtual topology in WDM
networks which constantly presents alternating traffic
over time. Two thresholds corresponding to the load
of the optical paths are introduced: one to detect over-
loaded and one to detect underutilized lightpaths.
Additionally, various power-efficient algorithms
considering the design of IP over EON (Zhu et al.,
2019) can be found in the literature. A fairly common,
yet effective method of energy saving is the exten-
sive application of optical bypass, reducing thus the
number of high energy-consuming optical-electrical-
optical (O-E-O) conversions, as the signal can be
transported, amplified and switched directly in the op-
tical domain. In (Zhang et al., 2015), energy efficient
traffic grooming in IP-over-elastic optical networks
taking into account sliceable optical transponders is
studied. MILP models among their corresponding
heuristics are implemented, for each of three differ-
ent types of bandwidth variable transponders, and in-
vestigated in terms of energy efficiency. Based on
traffic and optical grooming methods, Selene heuris-
tic (Kyriakopoulos et al., 2018a) is an online algo-
rithm which exploits the innovative Signal Overlap
technique for power savings in EONs. The work in
(Vizca
´
ıno et al., 2012) is dedicated to the study of en-
ergy efficiency in optical transport networks, compar-
ing the performance of an innovative flexible network
grid based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Mul-
tiplexing (OFDM) with that of Wavelength Division
Multiplexing (WDM) with a Single Line Rate (SLR)
and a Mixed Line Rate (MLR) operation. Energy-
aware heuristic algorithms are proposed for resource
allocation both in static (offline) and dynamic (on-
line) scenarios with time-varying demands for the
Elastic-bandwidth OFDM-based network and WDM
networks (with SLR and MLR). Lopez et al. in (Viz-
caino et al., 2012), provides an in depth energy effi-
cient comparison between conventional path protec-
tion schemes for fixed-grid (WDM) and flexible-grid
(EON) networks.
In this paper, an algorithm, namely SOLA (Switch
Off Links Algorithm), that disables EON network
links during the operation phase in low-use scenarios
based on a threshold value is proposed. The proposed
technique is based on prior knowledge in techniques
which switch off and/or put in low power mode net-
work equipment in fixed grid networks. However, the
impact of the contiguity constraint has not been exten-
sively researched in cases of shutting down network
components, which is the main contribution of this
work. Extensive simulation results indicate that the
presented algorithm accomplishes energy efficiency
and maintains tolerant bandwidth blocking probabil-
ity.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Sec-
tion 2 introduces the Elastic Optical Network model,
power model and constraints. Section 3 presents the
proposed algorithm. Section 4 gives the network en-
vironment, and Section 5 concludes this paper.
2 NETWORK MODEL
2.1 IP-over-EON Architecture
In this paper, a mesh based metropolitan or a back-
bone network which uses an IP-over-EON architec-
ture as shown in Fig.1, is considered. A typical EON
architecture consists of optical fiber links and optical
switches. Each optical switching node is connected
to the IP router ports through bandwidth variable
transponders (BVTs) (Yi and Ramamurthy, 2016).
At the starting point of the data transmission path,
the transponder, converts the electrical flows com-
DCNET 2019 - 10th International Conference on Data Communication Networking
64