Dynamic Threshold Reconfiguration Mechanisms for Green IP-Over-WDM Networks

IP-over-WDM optical mesh backbone networks handle most of the high-volume traffic that is exchanged between access networks. Internet growth and the increase in bandwidth demand per user render the power consumption equally important to the performance of the network. To achieve energy efficiency, virtual topology reconfiguration has emerged as a method of adjusting the network resources to the current traffic demand of optical backbone networks in real time. Deactivating underutilized lightpaths during the network operation can greatly reduce total power consumption. Threshold-based reconfiguration algorithms employ load thresholds to monitor the state of the network and act upon it. In this paper, prediction-based dynamic thresholds-virtual topology reconfiguration, a new dynamic threshold-based reconfiguration algorithm, is introduced, which calculates individual dynamic high thresholds by using the output of a load prediction module. In this way, the adaptivity of the algorithm and the lightpath capacity utilization are improved, leading to a significant increase of the energy saving.