Impact of traffic fluctuations and dedicated protection on energy savings in dynamic elastic optical networks

We present an analysis of the energy savings when taking into account a realistic traffic model. Daily and weekly traffic fluctuations as well as yearly traffic growth are taken into account when analyzing the power consumption given by the powered-on equipment as well as the IDLE opto-electronic devices. We also take into account the impact of the dedicated 1+1 protection schemes in a dynamic network scenario. A GMPLS control plane is implemented and used for re-configuration of the elastic connections. We show that a mixed modulation-format and symbol-rate adaptation allows for 45% every savings while a modulation-format strategy minimizes the power consumed of IDLE devices. Data-rate adaptive strategies allow energy savings in a network with dedicated protection to similar levels of the same network without protection enabled.