Dimensioning the Future Pan-European Optical Network With Energy Efficiency Considerations

This paper studies the overall energy consumption of a pan-European optical transport network for three different time periods: today and in five and ten years from now. In each time period the pan-European network was dimensioned using traffic predictions based on realistic data generated by the optical networking roadmap developed in the framework of the European project Building the Future Optical Network in Europe—BONE. A wavelength routed wavelength division multiplexed optical network based on either transparent or opaque node architectures was examined considering exclusively either 10 Gbit/s or 40 Gbit/s per channel data rates. The results manifest that transparent optical networking technologies are expected to provide significant energy savings of the order of 35% to 55%. It was also shown that the migration towards higher data rates, i.e., from 10 Gbit/s to 40 Gbit/s, is assisting in improving the overall energy efficiency of the network.