Power efficient service differentiation based on traffic-aware survivable elastic optical networks

This study assesses the feasibility of defining different service classes based on protection schemes in core optical networks. Moreover, we propose a dedicated energy saving strategy for each of the service classes in order to minimize the overall power consumption of the network. Four classes of service are proposed: platinum, gold, silver and best effort. Platinum connections benefit from a 1+1 protection scheme, gold connections and silver connections are assigned a 1:1 protection with the difference that in case of gold connections the same pair of transponders is shared by the working and protection spans while best-effort connections do not have any associated protection. Two scenarios are implemented and compared: a baseline approach and a proposed approach. The baseline approach does not take into account any traffic-aware strategies while the proposed approach includes energy reduction strategies taking into account the sleep-mode capability of the opto-electronic devices as well as the elastic data-rate adaptation based on symbol-rate and modulation-format re-configurations. The results show that in the baseline approach the power consumption is strongly dependent on the ratio between the different service classes while for the proposed approach the difference in power consumption is negligible. Moreover, in case of the proposed approach, silver service class can benefit for superior quality of service compared to the gold service class, due to the grooming mechanism.