A Quantitative Survey of the Power Saving Potential in IP-Over-WDM Backbone Networks

Abstract

Abstract-The power consumption in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) networks is growing year by year; this growth presents challenges from a technical, economic and environmental point of view. This has lead to a great number of research publications on 'green' telecommunication networks. In response, a number of survey works have appeared as well. However, with respect to backbone networks most survey works (a) do not allow for an easy cross-validation of the savings reported in the various works, (b) nor do they provide a clear overview of the individual and combined power saving potential. Therefore, in this work we survey the reported saving potential in IP-over-WDM backbone telecommunication networks across the existing body of research in that area. We do this by mapping more than 10 different approaches to a concise analytical model, which allows us to estimate the combined power reduction potential. Our estimates indicate that the power reduction potential of the once-only approaches is 2.3× in a Moderate Effort scenario and 31× in a Best Effort scenario. Factoring in the historic and projected yearly efficiency improvements ("Moore's law") roughly doubles both values on a 10-year horizon. The large difference between the outcome of the Moderate Effort and Best Effort scenario is explained by the disparity and lack of clarity of the reported saving results, and by our (partly) subjective assessment of the feasibility of the proposed approaches. The Moderate Effort scenario will not be sufficient to counter the projected traffic growth, although the Best Effort scenario indicates that sufficient potential is likely available. The largest isolated power reduction potential is available in improving the power associated with cooling and power provisioning, and applying sleep modes to overdimensioned equipment.

Can the Internet Be Greener? [Point of View]

“…With respect to the communication networks footprint for instance, large savings can be obtained by making careful use of wireless networks (since they are inherently less power efficient than wired networks), by introducing sleep modes during off-peak hours, by building equipment with power consumption more proportional to the load, by avoiding large power losses due to equipment doubling for recovery reasons, etc. [9]. Next to these initiatives, further research on Green ICT in industry and academics will be crucial.…”

Optimization/simulation-based risk mitigation in resilient green communication networks

“…For instance, an in-depth recent study of energy usage is given in Van Heddeghem et al (2015), where a very simple rule-of-thumb for energy usage is proposed as a universal value for the electrical and optical layers; simplified models of energy usage for various layers and techniques for connections characterized with the number of hops, recovery or its absence, etc., are presented; it is shown that energy efficiency is obtained by reducing marginal energy usage per unit capacity of a card port (a typical decreasing return to scale effect), thus justifying using concave energy profiles.…”

Joint Optimization of Failure Management Costs, Electricity Costs, and Operator Revenue in Optical Core Networks

“…The SM constitutes a promising alternative to save energy, and consequently to reduce the Electricity Costs (EC) paid by an operator [8,9]. The topic of managing the energy consumption of a core network during its operation has been deeply investigated by different works (see e.g., [10][11][12] for comprehensive surveys).…”