Traffic variation-aware networking for energy efficient optical communications

`Traffic-aware' networking is a solution allowing the improvement of the energy efficiency of optical networks. The implementation of these networking schemes makes possible to adapt the number of fully powered systems to the amount of carried traffic. Various traffic-aware schemes are available in the literature; some acting on the optical amplifiers, others on the optoelectronic (OE) devices. In this paper we introduce the parameter ρ to measure the energy savings introduced by a `traffic-aware' scheme; the savings are obtained by considering the maximum power required to transport the peak traffic and the average power required by the network to transport the traffic during a defined time-frame (e.g. day, week). The higher the ρ-parameter is, more energy-efficient the `traffic-aware' solution is. The energy efficiency of three on-off strategies, acting separately and/or jointly to amplifiers and OE-devices, are compared and discussed in terms of management implementation and network resiliency.