Energy-aware traffic routing and resource allocation in WDM optical networks

The growth of data traffic in telecommunication networks has increased the power consumption and its saving has become a key issue in planning and management of telecommunication networks. On the other hand, to guarantee availability and reliability, core optical networks have redundant resources to support extra traffic demand or infrastructure fault. The dedicated path protection (DPP) is an effective and widely used scheme to manage fault. However, networks supporting such strategy keep protection paths in active state, even in conditions where they are not carrying traffic, thus consuming power unnecessarily. To overcome this inefficiency, an effective strategy for decreasing wasted power is an adaptive traffic routing based on sleep mode, which is a state of low power consumption able to change quickly to an active state. The strategy is to route the traffic in order to maximize the amount of network components used by protection paths that can be set in sleep mode. In general, reported strategies reduce power consumption at the expense of increasing blocking probability. In this article, we address the power saving problem in WDM networks using DPP scheme proposing a wider resource search routing and wavelength assignment (RWA), named in-depth (ID-) RWA. Computer simulations based on the COST239 topology showed that the ID-RWA has better performance regarding the compromise between blocking probability and power consumption. Moreover, it manages to decrease the blocking probability while boosting the energy awareness.