Reach-related Energy Consumption in IP-over-WDM 100G Translucent Networks

The quest of extended optical reach has been one of the major drivers for the transmission systems research field. Since extending the optical reach does not come for free and that reducing the power consumption has become a mandatory task for network designers, we investigate IP-over-WDM network power consumption as a function of 100 Gb/s Transponders' (TXP) transmission reach. In order to achieve this target, we propose a novel analytical model that captures the increase of TXP power consumption vs. its optical reach. Network design is performed via a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) optimization engine. We have used two Multi-Layer design strategies, the Bypass (Bp) and the Direct-Bypass (DBp), that we have both applied to the "All-On" and the "On-Off" planning approaches: the former considers that transmission devices are always on and provides an upper bound to the network power consumption whereas the latter maximizes power savings by switching network devices On- Off according to daily traffic variations. Finally, simulations on a European-like backbone network show that there exists an optical reach that leads to a minimum network power consumption, the so-called optimal reach. By performing network design at the optimal reach we can achieve up to 36% and 37% of energy savings with respect to an extended reach-based design in the All-On and in the On-Off planning respectively.