Waveband grouping policies for reducing energy consumption in optical internet backbone networks

Energy consumption of optical switching nodes of the Internet core networks is becoming a critical issue due to increasing traffic rates and rapid integration of all-IP based 4^th generation cellular telephony networks. Recent research efforts show that waveband grouping has potential in alleviating this problem. Success of waveband grouping depends on the selection of appropriate grouping policies. By analysing the available end-to-end and sub-path merging waveband grouping policies, we develop two alternative approaches. Simulations show that these have significant energy saving potential.