Renewable energy-aware grooming in IP-over-WDM networks

The optical layer of a network is the energy-efficient technology to provision high bandwidths for data transport. Unfortunately occasional electronic processing, is unavoidable in current networks. This process is much more energy-consuming than the optical transport. Recent research has already yielded great improvements in terms of energy-efficiency. It is, however, observed that increased energy-efficiency typically leads to higher overall energy-consumption. Therefore it is imperative to reduce the environmental impact by additional means: maximizing the use of renewable energy. We present an approach to greenhouse gas (GHG) emission-reducing grooming by considering the heterogeneous distribution of fossil and renewable energy sources. We analyze various two step solutions for the route calculation and lightpath provisioning problem in IP-over-WDM mesh networks. We show that it is possible to reduce GHG emissions at a stable level of energy consumption and improved blocking performance compared to previous energy-efficient solutions.