Dynamic Power-Aware Routing and Wavelength Assignment for Green WDM Optical Networks

This paper proposes a novel Power-Aware Routing and Wavelength Assignment (PA-RWA) algorithm to be applied to a transparent Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) optical network. The proposed algorithm aims at improving the energy efficiency of the optical network by leaving unused optical fibres as much as possible in order to minimize the number of optical amplifiers kept active in the network. A dynamic lightpath establishment scenario is considered and results are compared with other routing algorithms showing that the proposed algorithm can drastically reduce the power consumption for any value of traffic load.