Power reduction techniques in multilayer traffic engineering

Automatically switched multilayer IP-over-optical networks offer extensive flexibility in coping with offered traffic. Multilayer traffic engineering (MLTE) takes advantage of this through online IP logical topology reconfiguration in addition to the more traditional rerouting. Although MLTE typically optimizes towards resource usage, bandwidth throughput and QoS performance, energy efficiency has become an equally important objective recently. In this paper, we examine two types of power reduction techniques and their interaction with the MLTE scheme: simple down-scaling of equipment power requirements, or more radical equipment architecture innovations which concentrate on reducing idle energy consumption. We show that both techniques require a different MLTE approach, and compare total power requirements for both scenarios.