Circuit switching and time-domain optical sub-wavelength switching technologies: Evaluations on the power consumption

The increasing of traffic in transport networks, and consequently of the power consumption, is motivating to search new solutions to improve the energy efficiency of the networks. In this work, we investigate new switching paradigms based on time-domain optical sub-wavelength switching technologies and we determine the dimensioning of networks employing these technologies. In particular, we quantify their power consumption for a ring network and we compare them with respect to legacy circuit switching solutions. Results show that sub-wavelength switching technologies can reduce the power consumption of networks on average of about 30%, in low traffic case, respect to circuit switching, meaning that they could be a promising solution to reduce the power consumption of networks.