Energy efficiency of optical OFDM-based networks

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has been proposed as an enabling technique for elastic optical networks to support heterogeneous traffic demands. In this paper, we investigate the energy efficiency of rate and modulation adaptive optical OFDM-based networks. A mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model is developed to minimize the total power consumption of optical OFDM networks. We differentiate between two optimization schemes: power-minimized and spectrum-minimized optical OFDM-based networks. The results show that while similar power consumption savings of up to 31% are achieved by the two schemes compared to conventional IP over WDM networks, the spectrum-minimized optical OFDM is 51% more efficient in utilizing the spectrum compared to the power-minimized optical OFDM.