Energy-aware de-allocation of lightpaths in WDM networks

This paper proposes a heuristic to de-allocate light-paths in Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) networks for reducing the network energy consumption. The idea is to avoid the overhead involved in the establishment of future lightpaths by rerouting connections to a lightpath to be de-allocated. Numerical results show that the proposed strategy saves energy while maintains blocking ratio at levels compatible to those of algorithms which do not employ rerouting of connections.