Power aware algorithms for provisioning green connections in optical networks

Internet traffic is growing exponentially day by day. Internet consumes a large amount of energy about 1-2% of world´s total electricity. One of the challenging constraints for the growth of internet will be its energy consumption. An approach to decrease energy consumption of internet is to deploy optical technologies based on WDM. Power consumption can be minimized by applying power saving strategies to the optical transport layer. In literature, it has been demonstrated that the power consumption in optical networks is lower than other technologies. Various efficient routing algorithms are developed for establishing connections in optical networks in such a way that the power consumption is mmimum. Connections established with minimum energy resources are called green connections. Existing literatures consider only power issues for routing problem. In this paper, power as well as hop counts are jointly considered for routing. Power aware routing algorithms are developed for provisioning green connections in optical networks.