Energy-efficient realistic design and planning of optical backbone with multi-granular switching

Energy consumption of the core networks is expected to contribute to a significant portion of the energy consumed by the telecommunication networks. Besides their high capacity and reliability advantages, optical networks have also emerged as promising technologies to ensure energy-efficiency in the core Internet. As an enhanced bandwidth utilization and management extent of the optical WDM technology, multi-granular switching concept has been shown to guarantee further energy savings when compared to the traditional traffic grooming. In this paper, we revisit the Routing and Multi-Granular Path Assignment (RMGPA) problem by having the objective of minimized power consumption and integrating the optical-reach limitation of optical signals in the design and planning. We explain the heuristic optimization approach used to solve the revisited problem. With the use of this heuristic, we present the design and planning for different optical backbone topologies using the multi-granular switching technology to demonstrate, analyze, and give insights on the impact of optical reach on the power consumption of the optical backbone.