Energy source-aware manycast overlay in WDM networks

Manycasting is an emerging communication paradigm which allows a single source to reach multiple destinations while providing flexibility in the selection of which destinations to connect with. Traditional wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) networks do not support the all-optical splitting of signals to multiple output ports as required by point-to-multipoint communication schemes. Previous work has proposed an overlay approach known as Manycasting with Drop at Member Node (MA-DMN) to provide manycast support as a logical overlay to basic point-to-point lightpath connections. This approach has been studied extensively and compared to alternative overlay models, and has emerged the obvious candidate for supporting manycast overlays. Throughout its evaluation though, MA-DMN has never been scrutinized in terms of its costs for energy consumption and associated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In this work, we subject MA-DMN to these evaluations, while also proposing a new more energy-conservative emission-aware variant known as MA-DMN using Least Impact Trees (MA-DMN-LIT). We compare these two approaches by simulating realistic quantities of dynamic traffic, and uniformly distributing renewable energy sources to power nodes throughout the network. We find that MA-DMN-LIT reduces energy consumption over MA-DMN by 6-10% across the network, while also reducing CO
₂
emissions by as much as 27%. We further conclude that MA-DMN-LIT also provides lower connection blocking by not over-subscribing shorter paths in the network as its emission-blind counterpart does.