Power-aware traffic grooming in WDM optical mesh networks for bandwidth wastage minimization: A genetic algorithm-based approach

The cost of optical backbone network has increased nowadays. So we need to reduce this cost. One of the major contributory costs is the power consumed by the underlying network. Power may also be consumed by different network equipments viz. add-drop multiplexers (ADM), Network Interface Device (NID), Optical Network Terminal (ONT), electrical-to-optical-to-electrical (EOE) conversion etc. In this article we have only considered the power consumption by EOE conversion in a mesh network. We have proposed a genetic algorithm to minimize the EOE conversions needed for a mesh network to satisfy all the traffic requests for a given physical topology. We have also considered the amount of wavelength wastages for our solution and we have minimized these wastages below a user given value. The results have been demonstrated on two optical mesh networks.