Dynamic optical switching for a greener Internet

Abstract

The continuous growth of the Internet might turn network power consumption into a major issue. There is a huge potential for decreasing future Internet energy requirements by synchronizing the operation of routers and scheduling traffic in advance, thus reducing complexity — e.g., header processing, buffer size, switching fabric speedup and memory access bandwidth speedup. Moreover, a lower complexity operation enables the realization of dynamic all-optical switching, which further reduces power consumption because (i) optical switching fabrics have lower power consumption than electrical ones (ii) dynamic switching enables a more efficient link utilization than static whole channel switching. Finally, an architecture is proposed for gradually deploying these technological solutions in the Internet while immediately starting to benefit from its power reduction potential and complementing them with energy-aware traffic engineering.