Design of Green Optical Networks With Signal Quality Guarantee

Energy consumption of communication networks is growing very fast due to the rapidly increasing traffic demand. Consequently, design of green communication networks gained a lot of attention. In this paper, the authors focus on optical Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) networks, able to support this growing traffic demand. Several Energy-Aware Routing and Wavelength Assignment (EA-RWA) techniques have been proposed for WDM networks in order to minimize their operational cost. These techniques aim at minimizing the number of active links by packing the traffic as much as possible, thus avoiding the use of lightly loaded links.