Load Adaptive Optical-Bypassing for Reducing Core Network Energy Consumption

We study dynamic reconfiguration of a core IP/MPLS-over-WDM network for adaption to traffic patterns changing during the course of the day. Our approach tries to route the traffic preferably in the optical layer and deactivates unused IP router ports. Our results show up to 57 % reduction of power consumption in low-load periods by load adaptive optical-bypassing and deactivation of network element subsystems.