Energy Efficiency of Electronic and Optical Network Elements

Decoupling of economic growth and energy consumption becomes a very important goal that can be achieved only by increasing the energy efficiency of new technologies and processes, i.e., the ability to provide a higher performance by consuming less energy. Communication networks play a significant role as a crucial part of the information and communication technologies. An adequate and future-ready communication network infrastructure has become one of the most important strategic goals of any government, region, and municipality because a high-capacity network leads to an accelerated development of both business and society. However, an increase in capacity is mostly associated with an increase in both total power consumption and power density of the related telecommunication equipment. Since the current technology is already approaching the fundamental limits with regard to the power density, there is a need to examine new approaches for achieving high energy efficiency. This paper aims to give an overview on possible potentials of new technologies for implementing energy-efficient network elements. It identifies main energy-related issues in high-performance network elements and tries to draw attention to some promising approaches for implementing low-consuming components and networks.