Green Optical/Wireless Access/In-Building Networks

This paper analyzes energy and power consumption of integrated optical/wireless in-building networks, with the goal of identifying energy hogs and finding ways to reduce the overall energy consumption of such networks. That goal can be achieved by optimizing network, node and circuit design along with an energy-efficient function allocation between the optical and wireless domains. This paper presents our methodology, results, and conclusions as well as selected measurement results from real networks and real network nodes. 1. Introduction Telecommunication and data networks industries have long focused on meeting the capacity and bandwidth demands of network users. While the ever-increasing user demand is a reality, over-provisioning of these demands has led to focusing on only boosting up the performance and neglect of another important engineering parameter: energy efficiency. Office building IT networks (OBITs) and residential networks contribute significantly to the power consumption of IT networks in the United States. This paper evaluates the network energy consumption of office buildings and residential buildings. Details are given in Section 2 for the former and Section 3 for the latter. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 evaluates the energy consumption of residential networks and a new energy efficient network design. Section 3 gives a similar analysis for office building networks. Section 4 compares the energy consumption of these two types of networks.