Cognition to design energetically efficient and impairment aware virtual topologies for optical networks

“Greening the Internet” is an important research topic in the last years. The Internet capacity and energy consumption have increased, and the utilization of design and operation techniques to reduce this consumption are a must. In this paper, we present a multiobjective genetic algorithm to design virtual topologies for reconfigurable wavelength-routed optical networks with the aim of reducing both the energy consumption and the network congestion while ensuring that the lightpaths of the virtual topologies fulfill quality of transmission requirements. Moreover, we also present another version of that method enhanced with cognitive techniques, and we show, by means of simulation, the performance advantages brought when introducing these cognitive techniques.