Reducing power consumption in an optical circuit-switched core network by switching off amplifiers

Power consumption of the core network of the Internet has become a critical issue due to increasing traffic rates and availability of bandwidth-intensive applications. Past research shows that a considerable amount of power can be saved by switching off network components. In this paper, we propose two heuristic algorithms to reduce power consumption of a fiber transport network, while guaranteeing full connectivity and flow protection. Preliminary simulation results show that the proposed schemes offer improvements in reducing power consumption over existing algorithms. At peak and off-peak traffic loads in the network, the proposed Multi-Objective Algorithm (MOA) reduces power consumption by 28.7% and 62.6%, respectively.