Green-aware routing in GMPLS networks

The increasing amount of traffic in the Internet has been accommodated by the exponential growth of bandwidth provided by the optical networks technologies. However, such a growth has been also accompanied by an increase in the energy consumption and the concomitant green house gases (GHG) emissions. Despite the efforts for improving energy efficiency in silicon technologies and network designs, the large energy consumption still poses challenges for the future development of Internet. In this paper, we propose an extension of the Open Shortest Path First - Traffic Engineering (OSPF-TE) protocol and a green-aware routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) algorithm for minimizing the GHG emissions by routing connection requests through green network elements (NE). The network behavior and the performance of the algorithm are analyzed through simulations under different scenarios, and results show that it is possible to reduce GHGs emissions at the expense of an increase in the path length, and, in some cases, in the blocking probability. The trade-off between emissions and performance is studied. To the authors knowledge, this is the first work that provides a detailed study of a green-aware OSPF protocol.