Evaluation of a centralized method for one-step multi-layer network reconfiguration

Due to increasing traffic volumes and access bandwidths, the power consumption of core networks will grow considerably. Adapting network configuration to traffic load is one counter-measure. Technological and operational limitations thereby require transitioning between subsequent configurations in a single step. In this paper, we define the according reconfiguration problem with resource-preoccupation constraints, and we propose and evaluate a meta-heuristics based solution method for this problem. We obtain energy savings of up to 35% compared to a simple resource adaptation scheme and only observe rare events of traffic blocking in particular situations.