Grooming demands instead of traffic: Benefits of a choice-based approach to Green optical networks

The problem of providing an agile, energy-aware, flexible optical network architecture is one of the challenges in optical networking in the coming decade. A key element in this challenge is the balancing of the benefits to customer and provider, and creating an agile system capable of reflecting both provider and customer interests on an ongoing basis as network conditions change. In this paper, we articulate how the traditional optical networking research area of traffic grooming may be combined with recent advances in Internet architecture, specifically a proposed Future Internet architecture called ChoiceNet, to make some key contributions to this problem. Our basic premise is that a marketplace that allows providers to advertise services on a dynamic basis, with accompanying prices that reflect the relative resource scarcity in the network at the time, provides a rendezvous of customer and provider interests, allowing collaborative optimization of network resource usage. With these pre-announced information, customers are able to make informed choices, thus participating in optimizing the use of available network resources for win-win benefits for providers and customers. We show how such marketplace choices naturally arise for energy-aware optical networks, and investigate the ensuing customer-provider interactions. Our results demonstrate the potential for win-win in this approach.