Green lightpath provisioning in transparent WDM networks: Pros and cons

Despite their intrinsic power efficiency, transparent wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) networks have additional potentials to save energy, and have attracted the interest of researchers with many power-aware (PA) routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) solutions being proposed in the literature. These approaches seem to have, however, an adverse effect on network blocking probability performance. This paper aims at providing a different insight to the PA-RWA problem. The idea is based on the intuition that power minimization and resource blocking can be jointly treated. The proposed approach, called Weighted Power-Aware RWA (WPA-RWA), has been tested using a continental core network and the performance evaluation confirms the presence of a trade-off between power saving and blocking probability.