Traffic grooming and energy-efficiency in flexible-grid networks

Energy-efficient design of flexible-grid networks is investigated. We focus on the design of the logical layer, usually disregarded when dealing with flexible-grid networks. More precisely, we evaluate the impact of introducing an energy-aware electronic traffic grooming in flexible-grid networks design. We propose two greedy heuristics for the network design, one exploiting traffic grooming, and we compare their energy efficiency. Results have been retrieved for several randomly generated networks of different size, with different connectivity, average physical link length and traffic scenarios. Significant energy savings can be achieved for low traffic loads and large network size when performing traffic grooming.