Economizing the operational costs of cloud services in an optical transport network

Cloud computing concept re-engineers the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) business by enabling on-demand and self-automated access to shared resources, and offers software, platform and infrastructure as services to the cloud users. As computing and storage facilities migrate to a shared pool of resources which are mainly hosted in the data centers, the traffic intensity in the backbone is expected to increase tremendously. Consequently, power consumption of the network equipment, as well as the data centers, is expected to increase the operational costs of the network and data center operators. In this paper, we present possible solutions to reduce the operational costs of the operators via virtualization of an IP over WDM backbone network with optical bypass in the presence of dynamic electricity pricing. Based on the cyber-physical properties of the data centers and look-ahead demand profile of the cloud-based services, virtualization of the optical backbone network is reconfigured in order to accommodate all demands with the objective of minimum operational cost for the network and data center operators. Through simulations, we show that efficient utilization and reconfiguration of the optical backbone enables cost-efficient and sustainable cloud communications.