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Energy-aware Allocation of Traffic to Optical Lightpaths in Multilayer Core Networks

01 November 2015

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The amount of traffic that is generated by users and services will continue to rise dramatically, affecting the performance of core networks, increasing their consumed energy and possibly constraining the growth of Internet. To this effect, multilayer automatically switched IP/MPLS over DWDM networks can be exploited for achieving improved performance and increased energy savings by flexibly allocating traffic to optical lightpaths. In particular, the consumed energy in a router can be minimized if the lightpaths are established so as to traverse a router without electronic processing and conversion of their signal between optical and electrical layer. Accordingly, this paper aims at providing an energy-aware solution to the problem of traffic allocation to optical lightpaths in multilayer core networks. The problem is first formulated and then a solution based on a heuristic algorithm, called Energy-aware Traffic Allocation to Lightpaths (ETAL) is proposed. The efficiency and worthiness of ETAL is validated through numerous simulations and extensive test cases. Results indicate that the proposed algorithm exhibits better performance in terms of speed and consumed energy, when compared to other traffic allocation and routing schemes.