Hybrid Optical Switching for an Energy-Efficient Internet Core

As Internet traffic grows, current core network technologies will raise issues in terms of energy consumption. Here, the authors propose three possible optical network architectures for the next-generation Internet core, including an all-optical hybrid optical switching (HOS) network, an optical/electronic HOS network, and an all-electronic switching network. They evaluate and compare all three networks with regard to performance and power consumption via an event-driven simulator.