Energy Efficient File Transfer over Rate Adaptive Optical Networks

This paper evaluates the energy benefit of file transfers over rate adaptive optical networks. We propose a power management scheme that switches optoelectronic (OE) interfaces and transceivers to different operating modes in response to the change in traffic and optimizes rate adaptation by utilizing the functional relationship between power and data rate. In addition to energy efficiency, we also study the impact of the rate adaptation and power management on network performance by quantifying the trade-off between per-bit energy consumption and file transfer latency.