Lowering power consumption in dedicated tributary protection schemes using Digital Subcarrier Optical Networks

The main objective of this paper is to investigate the amount of electric power that would be dissipated in Digital Subcarrier Optical Networks (DSONs) when applying dedicated tributary protection switching schemes. The advantage of deploying DSONs is threefold: (1) the contained signal processing that is required to achieve sub-wavelength digital subcarrier channel multiplexing, (2) the ability to switch off inactive channels (subcarriers), and (3) the ability to provision protection channels in stand-by mode using low rate signaling channels. A comparative study is presented using Optical Transport Network (OTN) equipment as benchmark. Various simulation experiments are conducted using the NSF topology, suggesting that up to 30% reduction in network-wide power consumption is achievable using DSON compared to OTN.