Green Packet Optical Transport Networks (P-OTNs) Based on Photonic PBB-TE Switches and Minimized EEE Overhead

Carrier Ethernet exhibits an enormous potential to be a cost-effective and less complex replacement of SONET/SDH especially after the ratification of IEEE standard 802.1Qay Provider Backbone Bridge-Traffic Engineering (PBB-TE). The recent IEEE standard 802.3az Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) presents another opportunity for service providers to select Ethernet as a technology of choice in the backbone while leveraging on its promise for achieving green transport network. In this paper, we propose two novel architectures of photonic PBB-TE core and edge switches, which enhance the usability of PBB-TE networks by reducing power consumption in individual switches in conjunction with passive optical bypassing and EEE. We also formulate the problem of energy-aware scheduling as an optimization problem whose objective is to minimize the overall energy consumption for transmitting Ethernet frames while satisfying their delay requirements. This model will be used as a benchmark while evaluating the performance of packet coalescing, a promising and recently proposed approach, as well as the performance of EEE.