An Overview of GREEN Networking and Power Savings in Optical Backbone Networks

This paper reviews and analyzes the extent to which sleep mode (SM) green routing impacts on operational energy savings as well as performance of optical backbone networks. First, we review Green networking concepts in general, followed by power-aware management of typical optical network devices such as edge/core nodes and regenerator equipment when SM routing strategy is implemented to make the network more energy efficient. We discuss a simple model describing energy consumption in a network before mitigating energy efficiency versus performance. Overall we conclude that SM green routing approaches can achieve fair network performance at comparable low operational energy consumption.